Improving Russia's policy on foreign direct investment

Foreign direct investment brings host countries capital, productive facilities, and technology transfers as well as employment, new job skills, and management expertise. It is important to the Russian Federation, where incentives for competition are limited and incentives to becoming efficient are blunted by interregional barriers to trade, weak creditor rights, and administrative barriers to new entrants. The authors ague that the old policy paradigm of foreign direct investment (established before World War II and prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s) still governs Russia. In this paradigm there are only two reasons for foreign direct investment: access to inputs for production and access to markets for outputs. Such kinds of foreign direct investment, although beneficial, are often based on generating exports that exploit cheap labor or natural resources, or are aimed at penetrating protected local markets, not necessarily at world standards for price and quality. They contend that Russia should phase out high tariffs and non-tariff protection for the domestic market, most tax preferences for foreign investors (which don't increase foreign direct investment but do reduce fiscal revenues), and many restrictions on foreign investment. They recommend that Russia switch to a modern approach to foreign direct investment by: 1) Amending the newly enacted foreign direct investment law so that it will grant non-discriminatory"national treatment"to foreign investors for both right of establishment, and post-establishment operations, abolish conditions (such as local content restrictions) inconsistent with the World Trade Organization agreement on trade-related investment measures (TRIMs), and make investor-state dispute resolution mechanisms more efficient (giving foreign investors the chance to seek neutral binding international arbitration, for example). 2) Strengthening enforcement of property rights. 3) Simplifying registration procedures for foreign investors, to make them transparent and rules-based. 4) Extending guarantee schemes covering basic non-commercial risks.Environmental Economics&Policies,Labor Policies,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Economic Theory&Research,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Environmental Economics&Policies,Foreign Direct Investment,Economic Theory&Research,National Governance,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism

Política de crescimento urbano intencional e acidental (com referência ao Brasil)

A “Política de Crescimento Urbano, refere-se a várias questões, tais como padrões nacionais de povoamento, problemas de amplo e rápido crescimento das áreas metropolitanas, desemprego e subemprego e os problemas fiscais e administrativos dos governos municipais. Esses problemas, por sua vez, são afetados por diversas ações governamentais — não somente ações empreendidas deliberadamente, com objetivos urbanos em vista, como também por razões  bastante diferentes e sem levar em consideração seus prováveis efeitos “urbanos”

Política de comércio exterior no Brasil

Este estudo analisa a proteção contra importações e os incentivos e desincentivos à exportação no Brasil. O enfoque se dirige primeiramente ao sistema que vigorava em julho de 1970. É ainda analisada a evolução da estrutura de proteção desde 1966, como também os níveis médios de taxas de câmbio a proteção líquida e as taxas de exportação implícitas desde 1954, com as principais conclusões: i. O Brasil em 1970 era relativamente aberto ao comércio exterior (com relação ao período 1954-67): ii. Os incentivos to rn a ram as exportações aproximadamente tão lucrativas quanto as vendas domésticas, em média. No entanto, a média é o resultado de uma estrutura de incentivos amplamente variável entre produtos, a qual deve ser revista a fim de proporcionar maior incentivo a produtos em que o Brasil tem uma vantagem comparativa: iii. A proteção desde dezembro de 1968 tem sido extremamente alta. Muitos setores que recebem proteção bastante alta são indústrias maduras, em que o Brasil não tem qualquer desvantagem inerente. Reduções em tal proteção seriam desejáveis, como também o seriam pequenos aumentos para outros bens que recebem muito pouca proteção e em que o Brasil é bastante eficiente

God and man in dogville: Memes, marketing, and the evolution of religion in the West

The movie Dogville (2003) provides viewers with a rare and provocative twist on differences between on the one hand the rigorous, Old Testament Jehovah, characterized by rules, and by rewards or punishments in this life, and on the other hand the loving, forgiving Christ and God of the New Testament and later Christianity who are characterized by forgiveness, and by rewards or punishments in an eternal afterlife. The movie, especially its ending, challenges the forgiving nature of the New Testament God and Christ, and makes a case that the Old Testament, rigorous Jehovah is more appropriate, at least for humans who respect themselves as responsible grown-ups. Earlier than these two views of God and man, and still alive and kicking, is a third view, the "Heroic." God is irrelevant here, either as a source of rules or as a source of forgiveness and redemption. Rather, man generates his own meaning by accepting his fate and struggling to do the best he can; this life is all there is and the struggle, i.e. living it is the only meaning. The three views can be seen on a continuum with the Heroic on one end and the forgiving Christ on the other, and the rigorous Jehovah in between and closer to the heroic than to the forgiving. The Dogville point of view, preferring a rigorous God to a forgiving one, is very rarely found in literature (the Grand Inquisitor episode in The Brothers Karamazov is similar to some extent) but both the Heroic and the forgiving Christian views appear everywhere, in all kinds of non-fiction, and either explicitly or as metaphors or parables in fiction. The Heroic view is taken here to include not only classic Greek and Roman heroic writings (e..g. those of Homer and Virgil) but also more modern schools of thought including Nietzsche, the existentialists, and other "God is dead" points of view. The paucity of the first view in literature is mirrored by the small number of its followers: all self-identifying Jews are less than 0.5% of the world's population and the orthodox are a minority within that. In stark contrast, about one-third of individuals world-wide self-identify as Christian. Followers of the Heroic view, roughly measured by self-identifying atheists and perhaps including agnostics, are between 15 and 20 percent of the population of the USA. Focusing on the United States, the data show that the number of adherents of each of the two extremes of an expanded continuum, i.e. the Heroic view on one hand and the born-again Protestant version of the forgiving view on the other, has been growing while the numbers of followers of everything in the middle, i.e. Judaism (excluding its New Age, non-religious variants), Roman Catholicism, and mainstream Protestantism have been declining. The waxing and waning of these different views are evaluated in the lights of literature, philosophy, psychology, marketing, and the idea that ideas ("memes" as coined, described and popularized by Richard Dawkins) evolve, endure or disappear according to the Darwinian principle of natural selection. The conclusion is that there are important, long-term reasons for the observed trend, and that therefore both born-again Protestantism and atheism are likely to continue to take market share from their competitors in the middle