Economic and social impacts of logging at national forests - a study case at Brazil

Brazil has the largest tropical rainforests in the world and most of them are located at Amazon River basin area. During the last three decades, deforestation are growing very fast in this region, having negative impacts at local and global weather. In order to minimize these impacts and protect part of the biodiversity, Brazilian government established several national forests in this area, but just one have being explored, the Tapajós National Forest (known as Flona Tapajós). This paper evaluates the economic and social features of a reduced impact logging project conducted at Flona Tapajós from 1999 to 2003. It was coordinated by IBAMA (the Brazilian governmental agency responsible for managing National Forests), funded by ITTO (International Tropical Timber Organization) and conducted by Treviso Agropecuária Ltda (a private enterprise). This project is locally known as ITTO project. Basing on field interviews and examining IBAMA´s and Treviso´s documents, this paper concludes that ITTO project was highly profitable for the private company, in spite of the company had obeyed all Brazilian working laws, what is not very common at this Brazilian region. Treviso´s internal rate of return was 35.79%. ITTO project impacted significantly the community workers involved with the project and it was able to teach this population how to manage rainforests in order to produce timber without destroying them. The paper ends by suggesting some attitudes that Brazilian government can follow in its discussion about new reduced impact logging projects to be implemented at Flona Tapajós and other national forests by both private enterprises and local communities.

Economic and social impacts of logging at national forests - a study case at Brazil

Brazil has the largest tropical rainforests in the world and most of them are located at Amazon River basin area. During the last three decades, deforestation are growing very fast in this region, having negative impacts at local and global weather. In order to minimize these impacts and protect part of the biodiversity, Brazilian government established several national forests in this area, but just one have being explored, the Tapajós National Forest (known as Flona Tapajós). This paper evaluates the economic and social features of a reduced impact logging project conducted at Flona Tapajós from 1999 to 2003. It was coordinated by IBAMA (the Brazilian governmental agency responsible for managing National Forests), funded by ITTO (International Tropical Timber Organization) and conducted by Treviso Agropecuária Ltda (a private enterprise). This project is locally known as ITTO project. Basing on field interviews and examining IBAMA's and Treviso's documents, this paper concludes that ITTO project was highly profitable for the private company, in spite of the company had obeyed all Brazilian working laws, what is not very common at this Brazilian region. Treviso's internal rate of return was 35.79%. ITTO project impacted significantly the community workers involved with the project and it was able to teach this population how to manage rainforests in order to produce timber without destroying them. The paper ends by suggesting some attitudes that Brazilian government can follow in its discussion about new reduced impact logging projects to be implemented at Flona Tapajós and other national forests by both private enterprises and local communities

The professionals speak: Practitioners’ perspectives on professional election campaigning

Faced with some fundamental changes in the socio-cultural, political and media environment, political parties in post-industrialized democracies have started to initiate substantial transformations of both their organizational structures and communicative practices. Those innovations, described as professionalization, become most obvious during election campaigns. In recent times, the number of empirical studies measuring the degree of political parties’ campaign professionalism has grown. They have relied on a broad spectrum of indicators derived from theory which have not been tested for their validity. For the first time, we put these indicators to a ‘reality check’ by asking top-ranked party secretaries and campaign managers in 12 European countries to offer their perceptions of professional election campaigning. Furthermore, we investigate whether any differences in understanding professionalism among party campaign practitioners can be explained by macro (country) and meso (party) factors. By and large, our results confirm the validity of most indicators applied in empirical studies on campaign professionalism so far. There are some party- and country-related differences in assessing campaign professionalism too, but the influence of most factors on practitioners’ evaluations is weak. Therefore, we conclude that largely there is a far-reaching European Union-wide common understanding of professional election campaigning

The Political Economy of Productivity in Brazil

This paper explores the link between Brazil's political institutions and its disappointing productivity and growth in recent decades. Although political institutions provide the president with incentives and the instruments to pursue monetary stability and fiscal discipline they simultaneously raise the costs of achieving those very objectives. The insulation of certain expenditures from presidential discretion necessitates the use of other policy options, such as high taxation levels and cuts in unprotected expenditures, which put a drag on productivity and growth. In a context of robust checks and balances and interest group fragmentation, a state overburdened by constitutional entitlements has resorted to massive increases in taxation. The resulting environment possesses both essential elements for sustainable economic growth and distortions that conspire against its realization. While some improvements in productivity and growth have occurred in the past decade, the pace has been slow and incremental