SOCIAL EXCHANGE RATES, MERCOSUR AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

The path towards a common market requires an alignment of macroeconomic policies. In the case of the MERCOSUL member countries, the observed disparities in the exchange, tax and monetary policies constitute major imbalances and impede future international economic integration. Apart from residual differences on trade policies among the member countries, macroeconomic policy disparities also reflect populism and the resulting lack of political will and mutual commitment with the regional goals. There is general professional agreement that, under a fixed exchange rate regimen with trade protection, the social exchange rate exceeds the official and/or market rate. Accordingly, the adoption of an exchange regimen with flexible exchange rates certeris paribus should significantly reduce the difference between the official exchange or market rate and the social exchange rate. The general purpose of this paper is to evaluate the impact of the changes of exchange policies in Brazil against the backdrop of the MERCOSUR economic integration process. To do this, an appropriate measure for the social exchange rate is developed and estimated. This measure also has an immediate practical relevance, as it is suitable for use in the economic analysis of investment projects in Brazil. By using a model of opportunity cost for foreign exchange to estimate the social exchange rate, the study concludes that there was no relevant alteration in the order of economic activities according to the degree of effective protection. The exchange policy changes effects will only be felt in the medium and long run, but their reflections can already be clearly perceived through the declining tendency of the social exchange rate.International Development, International Relations/Trade,

Potentials and limits to generate employment and income by the National Programme for Production and Use of Biodiesel

This study analyses the National Programme for Production and Use of Biodiesel launched by the Brazil Federal Government in 2005 as a public policy to generate sustainable employment and income within the context of development of new alternative sources of energy. It also verifies the impact of PNPB on occupation and income rate of farmers participating in the projects of production of biodiesel through field research carried out on 93 family farms participating in projects already implemented in the State of Goiás. The choice of producers was made at random from a list of all producers who had already gone through a complete cycle of production and stretched across 33 municipalities in the second half of 2007. The survey data was obtained through a closed-ended questionnaire which was designed to ascertain: 1) the increase of occupation and income regarding producers participating in the projects, 2) ways of including these farmers into the programme, 3) technical assistance offered to them (according to the guidelines of the programme) and 4) the evaluation of the programme by participating farmers. The SPSS software was used for processing and data analysis. The results show that most of the objectives of the programme, such as generation of occupation and income by family farming, are being achieved.biofuels, biodiesel, family farm, public policy, Agribusiness, Agricultural Finance, Industrial Organization,

The extended minimal geometric deformation of SU(NN) dark glueball condensates

The extended minimal geometric deformation (EMGD) procedure, in the holographic membrane paradigm, is employed to model stellar distributions that arise upon self-interacting scalar glueball dark matter condensation. Such scalar glueballs are SU($N$) Yang-Mills hidden sectors beyond the Standard Model. Then, corrections to the gravitational wave radiation, emitted by SU($N$) EMGD dark glueball stars mergers, are derived, and their respective spectra are studied in the EMGD framework, due to a phenomenological brane tension with finite value. The bulk Weyl fluid that drives the EMGD is then proposed to be experimentally detected by enhanced windows at the eLISA and LIGO.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figure

Extended quantum portrait of MGD black holes and information entropy

The extended minimal geometric deformation (EMGD) is employed on the fluid membrane paradigm, to describe compact stellar objects as Bose--Einstein condensates (BEC) consisting of gravitons. The black hole quantum portrait, besides deriving a preciser phenomenological bound for the fluid brane tension, is then scrutinized from the point of view of the configurational entropy. It yields a range for the critical density of the EMGD BEC, whose configurational entropy has global minima suggesting the configurational stability of the EMGD BEC.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, matches the published versio