Unemployment Insurance in Developing Countries: The Case of Brazil

Few developing countries have adopted an Unemployment Insurance (UI) program but the list of countries considering its implementation is growing. Focusing on the Brazilian UI program and using administrative data covering the universe of formal employment, we provide empirical evidence documenting two relevant facts for the debate around the design of such program in countries characterized by a large informal sector and a lack of administrative and enforcement capacity. First, UI benefits strongly affects the timing of formal job finding for those workers able to find a formal job soon after job-loss. Second, those workers constitute a small share of the overall pool of UI beneficiaries, since most job-losers do not find a formal job rapidly. Therefore, offering UI is costly (most beneficiaries would exhaust their benefits for typical lengths of benefit duration) and UI benefits have little distortionary effect on the job-finding behavior of the average (formal) job-loser: they constitute pure income transfers for 3/4 of the potential beneficiaries. We further discuss implications of these 2 facts and highlight some interactions with job protection legislations (hiring costs), the main policy instrument used to protect workers from labor demand fluctuations in those countries.

Balance-of-payments constrained economic growth in Brazil

This paper applies Thirlwall’s basic balance-of-payments constraint model to Brazilian economic growth in the period 1955-98, using cointegration technique. According to Thirlwall (1979) and MacCombie and Thirlwall (1994) the dynamic Harrod foreign multiplier, that is, demand-induced economic growth, determines long-term economic growth. The results show that there is a positive cointegration between growth in exports and long-term economic growth in Brazil which conclusion supports Thirlwall’s model.Thirlwall’s model; Brazil; balance-of-payments

Psychological wellbeing, satisfaction with life and optimism in sports managers

In the discourse of its managers, the competitiveness of national sport is increasingly relative, or captive, to the constraints of competitiveness of the respective national economy with an obvious impact on productivity of sports associations and clubs, reflecting a market of very unequal competition. Now, if in the modern conception of happiness, the material aspect plays a major character, the positive subjective experience, usually linked to performance and sports productivity, should result therefore from immaterial and intangible capital consisting in human potential and virtues that interests to study

External debt sustainability: empirical evidence in Brazil

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the sustainability of the external debt in Brazil, or, in other words, to analyze if Brazilian economy in consideration of its external debt repayments keeps solvent. Tests show that, for different periods and using different models and variables, external debt and current account deficits are not sustainable in the long run, confirming other studies that tested sustainability of the current account and external debt in Brazil.debt sustainability; Brazil; external debt

Weighted proportional fairness and pricing based resource allocation for uplink offloading using IP flow mobility

Mobile data offloading has been proposed as a solution for the network congestion problem that is continuously aggravating due to the increase in mobile data demand. However, the majority of the state-of-the-art is focused on the downlink offloading, while the change of mobile user habits, like mobile content creation and uploading, makes uplink offloading a rising issue. In this work we focus on the uplink offloading using IP Flow Mobility (IFOM). IFOM allows a LTE mobile User Equipment (UE) to maintain two concurrent data streams, one through LTE and the other through WiFi access technology, that presents uplink limitations due to the inherent fairness design of IEEE 802.11 DCF by employing the CSMA/CA scheme with a binary exponential backoff algorithm. In this paper, we propose a weighted proportionally fair bandwidth allocation algorithm for the data volume that is being offloaded through WiFi, in conjunction with a pricing-based rate allocation for the rest of the data volume needs of the UEs that are transmitted through the LTE uplink. We aim to improve the energy efficiency of the UEs and to increase the offloaded data volume under the concurrent use of access technologies that IFOM allows. In the weighted proportionally fair WiFi bandwidth allocation, we consider both the different upload data needs of the UEs, along with their LTE spectrum efficiency and propose an access mechanism that improves the use of WiFi access in uplink offloading. In the LTE part, we propose a two-stage pricing-based rate allocation under both linear and exponential pricing approaches, aiming to satisfy all offloading UEs regarding their LTE uplink access. We theoretically analyse the proposed algorithms and evaluate their performance through simulations. We compare their performance with the 802.11 DCF access scheme and with a state-of-the-art access algorithm under different number of offloading UEs and for both linear and exponential pricing-based rate allocation for the LTE uplink. Through the evaluation of energy efficiency, offloading capabilities and throughput performance, we provide an improved uplink access scheme for UEs that operate with IFOM for uplink offloading.Peer ReviewedPreprin

Resource allocation techniques for heterogeneous networks under user misbehavior

©2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.In this letter we focus on the uplink offloading with IP Flow Mobility (IFOM). With IFOM a User Equipment (UE) is able to maintain concurrently two data streams, one through LTE and the other through WiFi. We consider the existence of malicious UEs that aim to exploit the WiFi bandwidth against their truthful peers, in order to upload less data through the energy demanding LTE uplink and a reputation based method is proposed to combat the selfish operation. The WiFi bandwidth is allocated based on weighted proportional fairness and the LTE rate is defined through an exponential pricing algorithm. We theoretically analyse our approach and evaluate the performance of the malicious and the truthful UEs in terms of energy efficiency and throughput, through simulations. We show that while the malicious UEs present better energy efficiency before being detected, their performance is significantly degraded with the proposed reaction method.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Trade Liberalization and the Evolution of Skill Earnings Differentials in Brazil

Skilled labor earnings differentials decreased during the trade liberalization implemented in Brazil from 1988 to 1995. This paper investigates the role of trade liberalization in explaining these relative earnings movements. We perform several independent empirical exercises that check the traditional trade transmission mechanism, using disaggregated data on tari¤s, prices, wages, employment and skill intensity. We find that: i)employment shifted from skilled to unskilled intensive sectors, and each sector increased its relative share of skilled labor; ii) relative prices fell in skill intensive sectors; iii) tariff changes across sectors were not related to skill intensities, but the pass-through from tariffs to prices was larger in skill intensive sectors; iv) the decline in skilled earnings differentials mandated by the price variation predicted by trade is very close to the observed one. The results are compatible with trade liberalization accounting for the observed relative earnings changes in Brazil.Skill Earnings Differentials, Trade Liberalization, Tariffs Pass-through, Stolper-Samuelson

Trade liberalization and evolution of skill earnings differentials in Brazil

From 1988 to 1995, when trade liberalization was implemented in Brazil, relative earnings of skilled workers decreased. In this paper, we in-vestigate the role of trade liberalization in explaining these relative earn-ings movements, by checking all the steps predicted by the Heckscher-Ohlin- style trade transmission mechanism. We find that: i) employment shifted from skilled to unskilled intensive sectors, and each sector increased its relative share of skilled labor; ii) relative prices fell in skill intensive sectors; iii) tari .changes across sectors were not related to skill inten-sities, but the pass-through from tari .s to prices was stronger in skill intensive sectors; iv) the decline in skilled earnings di .erentials mandated by the price variation predicted by trade is very close to the observed one. The results are compatible with trade liberalization, accounting for the observed relative earnings changes in Brazil.earnings inequality, trade liberalization

Energy sharing and trading in multi-operator heterogeneous network deployments

© 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.With a view to the expected increased data traffic volume and energy consumption of the fifth generation networks, the use of renewable energy (RE) sources and infrastructure sharing have been embraced as energy and cost-saving technologies. Aiming at reducing cost and grid energy consumption, in the present paper, we study RE exchange (REE) possibilities in late-trend network deployments of energy harvesting (EH) macrocell and small cell base stations (EH-MBSs, EH-SBSs) that use an EH system, an energy storage system, and the smart grid as energy procurement sources. On this basis, we study a two-tier network composed of EH-MBSs that are passively shared among a set of mobile network operators (MNOs), and EH-SBSs that are provided to MNOs by an infrastructure provider (InP). Taking into consideration the infrastructure location and the variety of stakeholders involved in the network deployment, we propose as REE approaches 1) a cooperative RE sharing, based on bankruptcy theory, for the shared EH-MBSs and 2) a non-cooperative, aggregator-assisted RE trading, which uses double auctions to describe the REE acts among the InP provided EH-SBSs managed by different MNOs, after an initial internal REE among the ones managed by a single MNO. Our results display that our proposals outperform baseline approaches, providing a considerable reduction in SG energy utilization and costs, with satisfaction of the participant parties.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft