Book review: falling inequality in Latin America, edited byGiovanni Andrea Cornia

The volume aims to document and explain the sizeable decline of income inequality that has taken place in Latin America during the 2000s. It does so through an exploration of inequality changes in six representative countries, and ten policy chapters dealing with macroeconomics, foreign trade, taxation, labour market, human capital formation, and social assistance, which point to the emergence of a ‘new policy model’. Petterson Molina Vale is impressed with the unique contributions this volume contains, and recommends this read to students of Latin American policy and economics

GIS without GPS: new opportunities in technology and survey research to link people and place

This paper presents innovative ways to relate survey data to GIS maps, thereby making the connection of people and place more accessible for the research community. Based on data from rural areas in the Brazilian Amazon, we describe a successful effort to sample households while linking farm-level data to property boundaries, these boundaries generated from subjects’ interpretations of satellite images on a computer screen. The sampling framework is based on legislation requiring farmers to report to a government agency in a four-week period, and the farmers’ input allows for a more efficient means of identifying property boundaries as compared to GPS. We show that the resulting sampling is statistically representative. We discuss the potential of this association of institutional design and low-cost methods of data collection to allow for more cost-effective generation of spatial data and of geospatial analysis

Book review: the ecological hoofprint: the global burden of industrial livestock by Tony Weiss

The exploding global consumption of meat is implicated in momentous but greatly underappreciated problems, and industrial livestock production is the driving force behind soaring demand. In The Ecological Hoofprint, Tony Weis seeks to explain why the growth and industrialization of livestock production is a central part of the accelerating biophysical contradictions of industrial capitalist agriculture. Petterson Molina Vale finds that the book shows with clarity that it is time the role of livestock is reconsidered in society

The Conservation versus Production Trade-off: Does Livestock Intensification Increase Deforestation? The Case of the Brazilian Amazon

More cattle, less deforestation? Land use intensification in the Amazon is an unexpected phenomenon. Theories of hollow frontier, speculative behaviour and boom-bust all share the prediction that livestock production will remain largely extensive. Yet between 1996 and 2006 productivity of cattle grew by an astounding 57.5% in the average Amazon municipality. Does rising land productivity of cattle increase deforestation? I use secondary data and spatial econometrics to look for evidence of a positive relation between cattle intensification and deforestation (‘rebound effect’). The reduced-form model I employ is based on a spatial econometric specification by Arima et al. (2011) and uses panel data at the municipality-level. I show that mounting productivity in consolidated areas has been associated with lower deforestation both in frontier and consolidated municipalities. This suggests that any process of out-migration spurred by the rising productivity is insufficient to have a positive impact on deforestation

Transoceanic migrations (1998-2009): The (re)construction of contemporary Italianness among Italo-descendants from Argentina and Brazil

For nearly a century the Italian «great emigration» (1860-1970) drove millions of migrants to South America, in particular to Argentina and Brazil. According to the Italian legislation, their descendants are still entitled to the Italian nationality iure sanguinis. On which «Italianness» does this legal recognition lie? How was the identity of these «oriundi» shaped and passed on throughout the generations

Economics of climate change : an evaluation of the main models

Orientador: Ademar Ribeiro RomeiroDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de EconomiaResumo: A dissertação discute a maneira como o ferramental analítico da economia é aplicado ao estudo das mudanças climáticas. A determinação de quanto, quando e onde investir em mitigação das emissões de gases-estufa, e em adaptação às mudanças inevitáveis que decorrem do aquecimento global, é o papel central dos modelos econômico-climáticos. Trata-se de uma área de pesquisa relativamente nova, mas duas correntes já se delineiam: a gradualista, liderada por William Nordhaus, que adota modelos de otimização para o cálculo de custos e benefícios dos citados investimentos, e propõe uma taxa de mitigação linearmente crescente; e a precaucionista, encabeçada por Nicholas Stern, que utiliza um leque bem mais amplo de instrumentos de decisão, inclusive métodos não quantitativos, e que sugere a aplicação imediata do princípio da precaução. Depois de estudar detidamente os dois enfoques, fazemos uma avaliação crítica com base na literatura especializada, e concluímos que as recomendações divergentes de políticas climáticas de Nordhaus e de Stern decorrem, em primeiro lugar, da maneira como avaliam os resultados dos modelos (regra de decisão), além de decisões éticas quanto ao procedimento de desconto, e das estruturas dos modelos, com destaque para o tratamento da incerteza. Um terceiro fator que pouco os distingue, mas que caracteriza uma crítica mais substancial aos modelos, é o apego ao crescimento econômico com objetivo central da economia. Duas são as novidades do trabalho: uma caracterização das implicações da incerteza irredutível para o estudo das mudanças climáticas; e uma revisão da obra do principal autor da área, William NordhausAbstract: The thesis discusses the way the analytical toolkit of economics is currently applied to the study of climate change. The determination of how much, when and where to invest in greenhouse gas emissions mitigation and in adaptation to the inevitable changes that derive from it is the central role of climate-economy models. It is a relatively new area, but two research streams can be identified: the gradualists, leaded by William Nordhaus, who adopt optimization models to calculate costs and benefits of climate investment, and propose a mitigation rate that grows linearly; and the precautionalists, leaded by Sir. Nicholas Stern, who use a much broader set of decision instruments, including non-quantitative methods, and call for the immediate application of the precautionary principle. After studying these two approaches in details, we go on to critically evaluate them based on the specialized literature, and conclude that the diverging policy recommendations of Nordhaus and Stern can be attributed, in the first place, to the way they evaluate the results of the models (decision rule), followed by ethical decisions related to the discounting procedure, and by the structure of the models, particularly the treatment of uncertainty. A third factor that differs very little between them, but makes for a more substantial critique to the models, is the view that economic growth is the only and most desirable goal of economics. The novel contributions of the thesis are twofold: a formalization of the implications of irreducible uncertainty for the economics of climate change; and a review of William Nordhaus' work, the single most important author in the fieldMestradoDesenvolvimento Economico, Espaço e Meio AmbienteMestre em Desenvolvimento Econômic