China and Brazil: Potential Allies or Just BRICs in the Wall?

Brazil is an increasingly important actor in global governance and for China specifically. Sino-Brazilian relations have deepened considerably but they remain concentrated in areas of trade and investment. There is also considerable overlap in interests between the two countries in other areas, such as diplomatic and political relations. At the same time, China must manage carefully important differences that exist over the enlargement of the UN and the potential challenge to the Brazilian industry

Why Brazil has not Grown: A Comparative Analysis of Brazilian, Indian, and Chinese Economic Management

This paper does not aim to dispute that Brazil would benefit from reforms in any or all of these areas. Rather, the paper offers a skeptical perspective on reform menus and proposes an alternative explanation for the faster growth of Brazil’s peers India and China2. The paper begins by introducing (section 1) the idea of the BRICs countries, to establish the basis for comparisons of most similar cases. It then surveys the results of a generation of Washington Consensus era growth (section 2). Although there is a considerable amount of divergence over what causes growth, it seems that something approaching a consensus holds that universally applicable holistic reform programs have been largely discredited by economic performance in developing countries over the last two decades. Section 3 argues that post-Keynesian approaches, which focus on the maintenance of monetary and fiscal policy autonomy, offer a compelling explanation for the difference in growth results of Brazil, India, and China. That is, the inflation targeting system in Brazil has failed to adequately control inflation and contributed to slow start-stop growth while the more managed approaches favored by China and India have done the reverse

South-South relations and the English School of International Relations: Chinese and Brazilian ideas and involvement in Sub-Saharan Africa

The rise of large developing countries has led to considerable discussions of re-balancing global relations and giving greater priority to understanding South-South relations. This paper, in exploring the central ideas of Chinese and Brazilian foreign policy and the behavior of these two rising Southern countries toward Sub-Saharan Africa, argues that the English School of International Relations is well suited to understanding the intentions and actions that characterize South-South relations

Speak Clearly and Carry a Big Stock of Dollar Reserves: Sovereign Risk, Ideology, and Presidential Elections in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela

Partisan theories of political economy expect that bondholders will panic with the election of a left-wing presidential candidate. The latter seems to be what happened in Brazil in the 2002 presidential elections. However, quantitative analysis of perceptions of sovereign credit risk in Argentine, Brazilian, Mexican, and Venezuelan presidential elections from 1994 until 2007 shows no real evidence of a link between partisanship and perceptions of risk, even if the left-right divide is further broken down into left, center-left, center-right, right. Instead, international and domestic economic fundamentals have a stronger influence on risk evaluations. Qualitative analysis of the individual presidential elections shows the importance of policy uncertainty in explaining why certain electoral periods seemed more critical than others and how bondholders select between multiple equilibria. This research helps shift political analysis away from partisanship and more in the direction of policies and articulation

Bonds, Stocks or Dollars? Do Voters Care About Capital Markets in Brazil and Mexico

How does vote intention in presidential elections vary according to the economic conditions of a country, especially indicators of the financial market? Does the state of the economy, both its fundamentals as well as capital market, affect variation in candidates’ percentage of vote intention in national polls? This paper tests how economic indicators influence vote intention in presidential elections in two emerging markets: Brazil and Mexico. The presidential elections of 1994, 1998, 2002, and 2006 in Brazil and 2000 and 2006 in Mexico are analyzed using all poll returns for each electoral period and corresponding economic data. The paper finds that no theory is capable of explaining results throughout the dataset but partisan explanations and Stokes’ (2001) categories of alternatives to retrospective voting help elucidate vote intention

Conceptualising Comparative Politics

https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/all_books/1121/thumbnail.jp

Introduction: Still Provoking and Spurring the Understanding of World Politics

This essay introduces a collection of critical reflections on the legacy of Howard J. Wiarda, whose research spanned comparative politics and international relations, with special attention to his work on Latin America and the role of think tanks and political practitioners. Wiarda offered a consistent critique of deterministic and universal paradigms in comparative politics and in U.S. foreign policy and insisted on the importance of understanding local political culture and historic traditions. His criticisms of U.S. academic theories, and later of U.S. foreign policy makers, resulted from his position as a perpetual outsider and observer within both scholarly and policy-making communities. The essays introduced here critically engage with areas where Wiarda’s provocative critiques contributed to important discussions and insights. Specifically, the symposium includes accounts of his visions of grand theory, corporatism, think tanks, informality, U.S. politics, developmentalism, human rights, and U.S. foreign policy towards the Caribbean. The authors agree that his work was characterized by a striking vitality and ability to foment discussion, although they differ on how well his insights or approaches have held up over time

Howard J. Wiarda: Post-Script

This essay concludes the symposium by considering Howard J. Wiarda’s topical scholarship on grand theory, corporatism, democratization, and development, in addition to his regional scholarship, which focused on Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian politics but also touched on every other major region of the world, including U.S. politics and foreign policy making. We seek to makes sense of the tensions in Wiarda’s work, especially between his critiques of theoretical determinism and ethnocentrism on the one hand and his continual emphasis on cultural and corporatist explanations of comparative politics, on the other. We argue that he made significant contributions to the field through his service as a public intellectual, mobilization of multiple theoretical perspectives, use of inductive methods, provocative interpretations of comparative politics throughout the world, and accessibility to students and policy makers

Dussel Peters, Enrique, Ariel c. Armony, Y Shoujun Cui, Editores. Building development for a new era: China’s infraestructure projects in latin america and the caribbean

Fil: Spanakos, Anthony Petros. Montclair State University.Fil: Romo Rivas, Mishella. New York University; Estados Unidos.Since at least the middle of the last decade, scholars and journalists have been writing about the ‘new’ phenomenon of Sino-Latin American relations. Overwhelmingly, this research has focused on questions of how Chinese relations with Latin America either challenged US influence or ai-ded left-leaning governments in the region