Open access repository for the brazilian literature on agroecology.

The Brazilian technical and scientific literature on Agroecology is plentiful, is scattered and of difficult access and the hypothesis is that the knowledge of the area was produced but is composed by a knowledge to be organized. These features are barriers and constrains for farmers to use agricultural information as well as for providers of extension services to meet information needs of farmers. In this direction there is a consensus among researchers who study the information that the adequate alternative and adopted in the entire world are the open access digital repositories. Besides taking into account all essential actions to manage technical and scientific information, the open access digital repositories contribute to better communication process of Science. This occurs because such tools create necessary conditions to researchers to have timely, quickly, easy and perpetual access to the information they need to develop their activities. Also help to disseminate the results and provide increase on citation, researcher and institution visibility. A digital repository can be institutional or by topic where the institutional manages and fosters the scientific production of the institution as a whole. Repositories by topic make evident the stage of development of a scientific community. The objective is to describe how the collection of journal and magazines articles, conference papers, documents published by NGOs, government papers, dissertations and thesis, documents on the Internet, agricultural research produced by institutes and universities, etc. will be redeem to create and manage an open access digital repository of the Brazilian bibliographic production on Agroecology host by the Organic Eprints

Fairness and Redistribution- the Case of Latin American Countries

Following the suggestion of modern egalitarians, the model proposed by Alesina & Angeletos (2005) sets up a fairness rule based on composition of equality, designated by the weights of effort and luck. However, empirical evidence for a set of Latin American countries suggests that, unlike developed countries, these societies do not have a well-established view about the role of merit on economic outcome. Therefore, this paper proposes a theoretical framework based on a new fairness rule, namely the perception that the country does not offer everyone with the same opportunities. The new parameterization leads to a unique and stable equilibrium, characterized by an intermediate level of taxation between the equilibria of the "U.S." and of "Europe".Redistribution,Fairness,Fairness

Hans Kelsen and the tradition of natural law: why Kelsen’s objections to the natural-law doctrine does not apply against Aquinas’s theory of natural law

In his works, Hans Kelsen elaborates several objections to the so-called “doctrine of natural law”, especially in his essay The Natural-Law Doctrine Before the Tribunal of Science. Kelsen argues that natural law theorists, searching for an absolute criterion for justice, try to deduce from nature the rules of human behavior. Robert P. George, in the essay Kelsen and Aquinas on the ‘Natural Law Doctrine’ examines his criticism and concludes that what Kelsen understands as the Natural-law doctrine does not include the natural law theory elaborated by Thomas Aquinas. In this paper, we will try to corroborate George’s theses and try to show how Aquinas’ natural law theory can be vindicated against Kelsens criticisms

Bank Competition, Agency Costs and the Performance of the Monetary Policy

This paper extends the general equilibrium literature on bank competition in order to evaluate its role on the performance of the monetary policy. A new formulation of a financial contract taking into consideration both market power by banks as well as costly state verification is proposed here. Numerical simulations with the model economy parameterized to the Brazilian case are performed. Two cases are examined: One in which the banking sector is perfectly competitive and the other one when banks have market power. The main conclusions of the paper are the following: (1) Greater competition in the loan market enhances the response of the real economy to an interest rate shock; (2) Increased competition and/or a more efficient verification technology reduce the reaction of both the default rate and of the bank interest spread to an interest rate shock; and (3) The influence of the verification technology in the economy's dynamic response is greater when banks operate under perfect competition.

Real Balances in the Utility Function: Evidence for Brazil

The aim of this paper is to examine the relevance of a money-in-the-utility-function model for the Brazilian economy. In addition to consumption, the household is supposed to derive utility from leisure and from the holdings of real balances. The system, formed by the first-order conditions of the household intertemporal problem (Euler equations), is estimated by generalized method of moments (GMM). The results show strong support for the presence of money in the utility function for Brazil.

Fairness and Income Redistribution- an Analysis of the Latin American Tax System

This paper assesses the effects of income redistribution policies on "responsibilit -sensitive" fairness levels in major Latin American countries. In doing so, the following items are analyzed- i) the fairness rule described in Bossert (1995),Konow (1996), and Cappelen & Tungodden (2007) and; ii) the redistribution mechanism (taxation policy) proposed by Ooghe & Peich (2010). The results indicate that taxation does not have a significant effect on Latin American fairness indicators. This behavior can be explained, among other factors, by the fiscal design used, which utilizes high rates associated with the effort variables and fails to equalize unequal opportunities.Theory of Justice,Redistribution,