The Reform Process in Brazil

The Reform Process in Brazil

Author: Christian Sprinkmeyer

Publisher: GRIN Verlag

Published: 2012-03-02

Total Pages: 58

ISBN-13: 3869435410

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Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject Economics - Case Scenarios, grade: 1.3, Otto Beisheim School of Management Vallendar, language: English, abstract: This paper analyzes the path that Brazil?s economy has taken to reach today's status; the status of a stable economy that shows high potential to meet the challenging expectations that economists set on it. The idea is to source the roots of the economic stability and performance of Latin America?s largest country and to highlight the implications it will have in the near and remote future. Chapter 2 focuses on the Real Plan launched in 1994. A set of reforms which transformed Brazil’s economy from a protected economy facing four-digit inflation rates into a stable economy capable of competing with developed economies. It discusses the implementation of the Real Plan, its measures and its positive and negative consequences for the Brazilian economy. Furthermore we are going to deal with the recent past of Brazil’s economy since the presidential elections in 2002, when the leader of the workers’ party Lula da Silva was elected. We focus on the economic policy of the president and its government, whose election has almost led to the default of the Brazilian state because financial markets were afraid that the socialist candidate would pursue a 180 degree turn compared to the neoliberal economic policy of his predecessor. We analyze why Brazil was one of the last countries being affected by the financial crisis and why it was one of the first to leave it behind.


Transforming Brazil

Transforming Brazil

Author: Mauricio Augusto Font

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780847683550

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This book re-examines the relationship between development strategy and political regime in twentieth-century Brazil. The first part of the study examines the beginning in the 1920s and 1930s of the centralized regime and state-centered development model later challenged in the 1980s, taking into account the economic and political role of Sao Paulo relative to the federal government. The analysis provides a distinctive account of the regime ruling Brazil from the 1930s through the 1980s. The second part focuses on the process of economic and political change in the 1980s and 1990s, paying particular attention to the Cardoso administration.


Structural Reform Priorities for Brazil

Structural Reform Priorities for Brazil

Author: Nina Biljanovska

Publisher: International Monetary Fund

Published: 2018-10-08

Total Pages: 22

ISBN-13: 1484380363

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Over the last few decades, Brazil has experienced relatively weak economic growth due to stagnant productivity. To boost productivity, Brazil should embark on an ambitious structural reform process. In doing so, it is crucial that authorities select a few reform priorities to avoid dispersing political capital on an overly broad reform agenda. The paper aims to identify Brazil’s reform priorities in two steps. First, it estimates the impact that different reforms have on Brazil’s productivity. Second, it analyzes survey data to assess the extent of public support for reforms. The results show that banking sector reforms would generate the largest productivity gains and have the highest level of public support. Moreover, they would also be relatively easy to legislate and generate significant fiscal savings.


Reforming Brazil

Reforming Brazil

Author: Mauricio Augusto Font

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9780739105870

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This groundbreaking work is the first volume in English to examine Brazil's historic policy reforms of the 1990s and the political, economic, and social results. For years the large and ineffective government of Brazil could neither improve the country's greatly uneven distribution of wealth nor maintain inflation at reasonable levels. In the 1990s, long overdue changes bettered the government's fiscal performance, tamed inflation, and addressed chronic social ills stemming from the imbalance of wealth. But many problems, and many questions, remain. Why is Brazil still so poor, and why is inequality so intransigent? Were some of the reforms counterproductive, or could they have been implemented in a more effective way? Collecting essays by top Brazilianist scholars from various disciplines and intellectual traditions, Reforming Brazil provides new insights for international policy makers, economists, and scholars of Brazil.


Between Presidential Power and Legislative Veto

Between Presidential Power and Legislative Veto

Author: Andreas Hahn

Publisher: Logos Verlag Berlin GmbH

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 3832525394

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Reform success and reform delay are subject to a variety of explanations. In general, high decisiveness leads to reform propensity, while its absence, or high resoluteness, to policy-gridlock. The Brazilian reform experience is contradicting: both aspects are present - factors leading to decisiveness as well as those inducing gridlock and reform delay. Leaving the static point of view and accounting for a dynamic development, this apparent contradiction gets resolved: in fact, the executive gained growing leeway during the 1990s, providing it with the means to achieve a higher degree of decisiveness of the political system by simultaneously guaranteeing resoluteness.It is, however, greatly mistaken to consider this development as a blank cheque to universal, encompassing reforming in all areas. Despite growing executive dominance and growing policy consensus, some particular reforms were a success, while others did not surpass its initial stages. This is finally due to path-dependency and explicit policy-specificities, triggering different institutional constraints and veto-points, which even strong Presidents cannot override.


Twenty Years of Health System Reform in Brazil

Twenty Years of Health System Reform in Brazil

Author: Michele Gragnolati

Publisher: World Bank Publications

Published: 2013-06-27

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 0821398431

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It has been more than 20 years since Brazil's 1988 Constitution formally established the Unified Health System (Sistema Unico de Saude, SUS). Building on reforms that started in the 1980s, the SUS represented a significant break with the past, establishing health care as a fundamental right and duty of the state and initiating a process of fundamentally transforming Brazil's health system to achieve this goal. This report aims to answer two main questions. First is have the SUS reforms transformed the health system as envisaged 20 years ago? Second, have the reforms led to improvements with regard to access to services, financial protection, and health outcomes? In addressing these questions, the report revisits ground covered in previous assessments, but also brings to bear additional or more recent data and places Brazil's health system in an international context. The report shows that the health system reforms can be credited with significant achievements. The report points to some promising directions for health system reforms that will allow Brazil to continue building on the achievements made to date. Although it is possible to reach some broad conclusions, there are many gaps and caveats in the story. A secondary aim of the report is to consider how some of these gaps can be filled through improved monitoring of health system performance and future research. The introduction presents a short review of the history of the SUS, describes the core principles that underpinned the reform, and offers a brief description of the evaluation framework used in the report. Chapter two presents findings on the extent to which the SUS reforms have transformed the health system, focusing on delivery, financing, and governance. Chapter three asks whether the reforms have resulted in improved outcomes with regard to access to services, financial protection, quality, health outcomes, and efficiency. The con


Crafting Coalitions for Reform

Crafting Coalitions for Reform

Author: Peter R. Kingstone

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2010-11-01

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 9780271043777

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The success of political efforts to create a more open economy in Brazil over the past decade has depended crucially on support from the industrial sector, which long enjoyed the benefits of protection by the state from economic competition. Why businesses previously so sheltered would back neoliberal reform, and why opposition arose at times from sectors least threatened by free trade, are the puzzles this book seeks to answer. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews with industrialists and business association representatives, as well as a wide range of other sources, Peter Kingstone argues that the key to understanding the behavior of industrialists lies in the impact of four factors on their preferences for reform: the effect of economic crisis on industrialists' perception of the viability of the earlier development model; the sectoral location of their firms in the economy and the advantages historically accruing therefrom; the adjustment options available to them given their position in the market; and the credibility of the government's promises about reform and its tactical choices for getting them implemented through the political system. The mix of these four factors, Kingstone shows, left business preferences relatively malleable and thus available for support of reform, even in the face of potentially high costs. Whether such support was forthcoming depended on industrialists' perceptions of the ability of government leaders to deliver on their promises. Widespread resistance to reform occurred when leaders lost their credibility. Under Fernando Collor's leadership, that credibility was never recovered; under Fernando Henrique Cardoso's, it was recovered through increasing concessions to industrialists on the character of the reform program.


Big Business and Brazil's Economic Reforms

Big Business and Brazil's Economic Reforms

Author: Luiz Kormann

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-04-17

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 1317602498

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In the 1990s Brazil launched a comprehensive economic liberalization program. It lifted its trade barriers, adopted new market-oriented regulations, opened up its capital market and abandoned earlier efforts to internalize production and to build vertically integrated systems across several sectors of the economy. In spite of the visible gap that separated the top global giants from the large local enterprises, Brazilian companies seemed to be willing to join in an economic liberalization process that was bound to expose them to unprecedented levels of competition, bring about a high degree of uncertainty and, in many cases, ultimately put their own businesses at risk. Big Business and Brazil’s Economic Reforms examines the most emblematic aspect of the Brazilian economic reforms, the support from parts of the local entrepreneurial class for the opening up of the economy. It investigates the reasons why Brazil carried out these economic reforms in the 1990s, the transition process and the impact of the opening up of the economy on some of its most important sectors, such as the aerospace, auto and auto parts, food processing, oil and petrochemicals, ethanol, steel, telecoms and telecom equipment industries. This book offers an in-depth analysis of Brazil’s distinctive development paths, from the Latin American economic thinking of the early stages of its industrialization to the neo-liberal stance of the present day. It sheds new light on one of the main challenges facing all the large developing economies in their move to become more integrated into the world economy, the fostering of large enterprises, and is a great resource for students and researchers interested in global business, development economics, and Latin American economic history.


Judging Policy

Judging Policy

Author: Matthew M. Taylor

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2008-02-26

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0804786798

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Courts, like other government institutions, shape public policy. But how are courts drawn into the policy process, and how are patterns of policy debate shaped by the institutional structure of the courts? Drawing on the experience of the Brazilian federal courts since the transition to democracy, Judging Policy examines the judiciary's role in public policy debates. During a period of energetic policy reform, the high salience of many policies, combined with the conducive institutional structure of the judiciary, ensured that Brazilian courts would become an important institution at the heart of the policy process. The Brazilian case thus challenges the notion that Latin America's courts have been uniformly pliant or ineffectual, with little impact on politics and policy outcomes. Judging Policy also inserts the judiciary into the scholarly debate regarding the extent of presidential control of the policy process in Latin America's largest nation. By analyzing the full Brazilian federal court system—including not only the high court, but also trial and appellate courts—the book develops a framework with cross-national implications for understanding how courts may influence policy actors' political strategies and the distribution of power within political systems.