Macroeconomic coordination and commercial integration in MERCOSUR

Commercial integration in the Mercosur area has increased substantially in the last few years and it is expected to continue to grow rapidly in the near future. However, given the historical record of policy management in the region, especially in Brazil and Argentina, the main partners of this integration initiative, it is not clear whether macroeconomic policies will provide the required conditions of sustainability for such a rapid trade expansion. This paper discusses the relationship between macroeconomic coordination and commercial integration in the context of Mercosur. After examining the impact of policy instability on trade flows within the region in recent years, it evaluates the prospects for closer coordination of macroeconomic policies in the future.

State-government bailouts in Brazil

As a result of the consolidation of the democracy after the end of the military regime in the mid-1980s, Brazil has gone through a period of remarkable decentralization both in fiscal and political terms. The move towards decentralized management and control of public finances has been followed by a series of bailouts of state governments by the federal government. The lack of effective control on borrowing, coupled with reputational effects originating from these repeated bailout operations, reduced fiscal discipline and created an explosive accumulation of debts in Brazilian states during the last decade. The main purpose of this paper is to assess the determinants of state debt bailouts in Brazil and their relationship with states’ fiscal discipline during the 1990s. After providing a brief overview of intergovernmental fiscal relationships in the Brazilian economy, the paper describes state debt developments from the mid-1980s on, with special emphasis on the 1989, 1993 and 1997 state debt bailouts. Then it discusses the determinants of state debt bailouts in Brazil along the lines of a conceptual framework which recognizes that the essence of the bailout question is the issue of moral hazard and also presents empirical evidence that the occurrence of bailouts is associated with lower fiscal discipline in Brazilian states during the 1990s.

Fiscal impulse in the Brazilian economy

This paper develops an alternative indicator of fiscal policy which allows a more accurate picture of the underlying fiscal trend in the Brazilian economy over the recent period. This indicator corrects conventional fiscal-stance measures for the effects of theeconomic cycle, and yields a measure of the discretionary change in the budgetary position of the public-sector, known as the fiscal impulse. Section 2 briefly examines the evolution of traditional fiscal policy indicators over the recent period, detecting the bottom line of the changes in the fiscal stance. The details of the estimation of the fiscal impulse measure for the Brazilian economy are presented in Section 3. Section 4 concludes the paper with a reassessment of recent fiscal policy episodes, using the data generated in the previous section. The resulting fiscal-impulse measure indicates that, on average, the fiscal stance during 1989-96 was more expansionist than suggested by traditional fiscal policy indicators.

Design of supersonic Coanda jet nozzles

The thrust vectoring of supersonic Coanda jets was improved by designing a nozzle to skew the initial jet velocity profile. A new nozzle design procedure, based on the method of characteristics, was developed to design a nozzle which produces a specified exit velocity profile. The thrust vectoring of a simple convergent nozzle, a convergent-divergent nozzle, and a nozzle which produces a skewed velocity profile matched to the curvature of the Coanda surface were expermentially compared over a range of pressure ratios from 1.5 to 3.5. Elimination of the expansion shocks with the C-D nozzle is shown to greatly improve the thrust vectoring; elimination of turning shocks with the skewed profile nozzle further improves the vectoring

Delaying Public Sector Reforms: Post-Stabilization Fiscal Strains in Brazil

Since the mid-1980s Brazil has experienced a period of great macroeconomic instability. Examining the evolution of the primary balance during these years, one identifies three markedly distinct periods: 1985 to 1989, 1990 to 1994, and 1995-96. The average primary surplus increased from 0. 6 percent of GDP in 1985-89, to 3. 1 percent in 1990-94, falling back to less than 0. 1 percent of GDP in 1995-96. The reduction in the operational deficit between 1985-89 and 1990-94 reached almost 5. 5 percent of GDP, with more than half of the improvement coming from falling interest payments. Between 1990-94 and 1995-96, the operational deficit widened by 4. 5 percent of GDP. Only less than a third of that variation may be attributed to rising interest payments. All the rest came from the vanishing primary surplus.

AdS pure spinor superstring in constant backgrounds

In this paper we study the pure spinor formulation of the superstring in $AdS_5\times S^5$ around point particle solutions of the classical equations of motion. As a particular example we quantize the pure spinor string in the BMN background.Comment: 17 pages. Typos corrected. References adde

Public sector debt dynamics in Brazil

1. INTRODUCTION 2. POLICY MIX AND THE PUBLIC-SECTOR NET DEBT 3. SKELETONS IN THE CLOSET, PRIVATIZATION PROCEEDS AND SEIGNIORAGE 4. SIMULATING DEBT DYNAMICS 5. SENSITIVITY ANALYSIS 6. CONCLUDING REMARKS APPENDIX: THE SIMULATION MODEL