Democracy postponed: a political economy of Brazil’s oligarchic foreign policy

This chapter examines the ebbs and flows of pressure to democratize Brazil’s foreign policy and their implications for Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Itamaraty, which claims a monopoly over the formulation and practice of the country’s diplomacy. We hold distinct the questions of the democratic character of Brazilian foreign policy and the extent to which it is monopolized by Itamaraty (Lopes, 2013). Just as a state’s monopoly over the means of violence tells us little about a country’s democratic nature, the monopolization of diplomacy by a foreign ministry provides scant insight into the character of a country’s foreign policy.Research for this paper supported by Australian Research Council grant# DE120100401.Australian Research Counci

“Flipping” Kuznets: evidence from Brazilian municipal level data on the linkage between income and inequality

Using census data (for 1991 and 2000) for more than 5.000 municipalities, we examine the relationship between income per capita and inequality at the municipal level in Brazil. We uncover the existence of an “inverted-U” relationship in 1991 that flipped into a “straight-U” relationship in 2000, both of which are statistically significant. Such a flip has important implications, as it suggests that the current decline in inequality is likely to reverse as GDP per capita increases, with radically different prospects for the evolution of inequality in the country. Building on our case, and very tentatively, we submit that the flip may be due to the association of economic growth with industrialization. As long as the two are positively correlated, as was the case in Brazil and Latin America until late in the 20th Century, in OECD countries until the 1970s, and today in China and India, the standard Kuznets curve adequately describes the relationship between development and inequality. When that correlation is negative, however, i.e. when growth is accompanied by de-industrialization, as is the case in OECD countries since the 1980s and in Brazil since the 1990s, the curve “flips” and inequality declines at first, and then increases again after a tipping point has been reached

Construction and Deconstruction of a Homicide Reduction Policy: The Case of Pact for Life in Pernambuco, Brazil

This paper tries to demonstrate that both the fall in homicides in Pernambuco (from 2007-2013) and the resurgence in them that followed (2014-2017) are fundamentally linked to two explanatory variables, which are in turn connected: the model of governance of public security produced in Pernambuco at the level of state government strategy and the capacity for deterrence produced in the framework of the Criminal Justice System (especially that of state police, who are under the responsibility and "control" of the executive power of the state). This article argues that the construction of this specific model of governance of Public Security and the definition, monitoring and realization of deterrence strategies within the police were crucial to the reduction of the number of homicides in the most violent areas of the state. On the other hand, the dissolution of the capacity for integrated governance of the police, with the consequent dismantling of the deterrence capacity aimed primarily at the reduction of homicides and crimes against life that had been successfully conceived and realized between 2007 and 2013, explains the increase in intentional violent crimes that has been observed since 2014