Brazil’s Achievements and Challenges

Wirtschaftslage; Soziale Lage; Wirkungsanalyse; Brasilien

Fiscal responsibility legislation and fiscal adjustment : the case of Brazilian local governments

This paper discusses trends in fiscal adjustment in Brazil since the 1990s, with particular emphasis on the strengthening of institutions for fiscal policymaking, and its effect on local government finances and their ability to invest in infrastructure building and upgrading. Although fiscal adjustment, which is ongoing, has taken a toll on the government's ability to finance much-needed infrastructure investment, it is not the only culprit. A lack of budget flexibility, against a backdrop of increasing downward rigidities in current spending, also constrains the government's ability to invest. The paper argues that regulatory uncertainty in many sectors, particularly water and sanitation, in which the municipalities play a leading role, has discouraged private sector investment and that the financing of infrastructure building and upgrading goes beyond the municipal level of government. Higher-level jurisdictions are responsible for financing investment in energy and transport infrastructure, for example.Public Sector Economics&Finance,Municipal Financial Management,Urban Economics,Public&Municipal Finance,Public Sector Management and Reform

Fiscal Decentralization and Urbanization in Indonesia

Indonesia went through a process of fiscal decentralization in 2001 involving the devolution of several policymaking and service delivery functions to the subnational tiers of government (provinces and districts). This process is likely to have affected rIndonesia, minimum wage, federalism, urbanization

Educational attainment and selection into the labour market: The determinants of employment and earnings in Indonesia

This paper uses household survey (Sakernas) data from 2004 to estimate the determinants of earnings in Indonesia, a country where non-salaried work is widespread and where earnings data are available for salaried employees only. We deal with the selection bias by estimating a full-information maximum likelihood system of equations, where earnings are observed for salaried employees, and selection into the labour market is modelled in a multinomial setting. We also deal with reverse causality between educational attainment and earnings by instrumenting years of schooling in both the multinomial selection and the earnings equations. Our identification strategy, following Duflo (2001), uses information on exposure to a large-scale school construction programme implemented in the 1970s. Duflo recognizes that schooling may affect an individual's probability of working as a salaried employee, which creates a simultaneity bias, but does not directly deal with this issue. We find that the parameters of the earnings equation estimated under multinomial selection differ from standard OLS estimates, which ignore the selection bias, and from a binomial selection procedure "à la Heckman" (1979). In particular, the estimated parameters that vary the most are those related to the variables with the strongest impact on individual selection into the different labour-market statuses. We also find that workers with higher educational attainment are most likely to find a job as salaried employees, and that non-salaried work is as an alternative to inactivity.Indonesia ; employment ; earnings ; multinomial selection

MESSAGE ON THE BOTTLE: COLOURS AND SHAPES OF WINE LABELS

Wine consumers rely mainly on the label on the bottle to infer the quality of its content. But there is little empirical research on how colours can be interacted with shapes in the design of wine labels. This study draws from an experiment using data from Spain and shows that there are strong preferences for selected colour-shape combinations in label design. Surprisingly, colour alone does not elicit as strong preferences as certain shapes do, at least when they are assessed irrespectively of the shapes featured in the label. Other combinations, on the other hand, are very resilient, especially those that contain colour hues, such as brown, yellow, black and green, in labels with salient rectangular and hexagonal patterns.wine labels, Marketing,

Interdependencies between Monetary Policy and Foreign Exchange Intervention under Inflation Targeting: The Case of Brazil and the Czech Republic

The bulk of recent literature on foreign exchange interventions has overlooked the potential interdependencies that may exist between these operations and the conduct of monetary policy. This is the case even under inflation targeting and especially in emerging-market economies, because central banks often explicitly reserve the right to intervene to calm disorderly markets and to accumulate foreign reserves, and when the exchange rate is perceived as being out of step with fundamentals. This paper uses a friction model to estimate intervention reaction functions and the associated marginal effects for Brazil and the Czech Republic since the adoption of inflation targeting in these countries in 1999 and 1998, respectively. The main findings are that: (i) in both countries interventions occur predominantly to reduce exchange rate volatility, while in Brazil the central bank also reacts to exchange rate deviations from medium-term trends; (ii) there are strong, asymmetric threshold effects in the reaction functions, and interventions are more likely and of higher magnitudes when they are carried out to depreciate than to appreciate the domestic currency; and (iii) interventions seem to take place independently of contemporaneous monetary policy in Brazil, but not in the Czech Republic, where both policies appear to be interrelated.monetary policy, interventions, inflation targeting, friction model, Brazil, Czech Republic