Brazil enters the election year 2018 with an economy that is gradually recovering from the deepest recession in its recent economic history. This book is motivated by the need to understand the possible drivers of future income and employment growth.
... Exibir mais + Shifting Brazil’s production structure to be the same as that of the United States will raise productivity by just 68 percent; making all Brazilian industries work as efficiently as their counterparts in the United States will boost productivity more than four times. This book analyses some of the factors that may be behind such low productivity. Among the most important: (a) a lack of competition both internally, thanks to a business environment that favors incumbents and hampers innovation and entry, and externally, due to high-tariff and nontariff barriers to trade; (b) government policies that have concentrated on subsidizing existing firms, and distorting capital and labor markets, rather than fostering competition and innovation; and (c) fragmented government institutions for business support that have allowed policies to persist without much regard for whether or not they had shown to be effective. The book recommends a policy shift in all three areas, with the ultimate objective to change the relationship between business and the state from one governed by perks and privileges to one built on creating a level playing field that incentivizes initiative and supports workers and firms to adjust to the demands of the market. This book fits into the context of a growing policy debate about what should be Brazil’s future development model.
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Brazil enters the election year 2018 with an economy that is gradually recovering from the deepest recession in its recent economic history. This book is motivated by the need to understand the possible drivers of future income and employment growth.
... Exibir mais + Shifting Brazil’s production structure to be the same as that of the United States will raise productivity by just 68 percent; making all Brazilian industries work as efficiently as their counterparts in the United States will boost productivity more than four times. This book analyses some of the factors that may be behind such low productivity. Among the most important: (a) a lack of competition both internally, thanks to a business environment that favors incumbents and hampers innovation and entry, and externally, due to high-tariff and nontariff barriers to trade; (b) government policies that have concentrated on subsidizing existing firms, and distorting capital and labor markets, rather than fostering competition and innovation; and (c) fragmented government institutions for business support that have allowed policies to persist without much regard for whether or not they had shown to be effective. The book recommends a policy shift in all three areas, with the ultimate objective to change the relationship between business and the state from one governed by perks and privileges to one built on creating a level playing field that incentivizes initiative and supports workers and firms to adjust to the demands of the market. This book fits into the context of a growing policy debate about what should be Brazil’s future development model.
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The focus of this paper is on policies that ought to support productivity, output and employment growth. This support can be direct and indirect, targeted to specific sectors or types of firms or wide ranging.
... Exibir mais + The presence of externalities is the main theoretical justification for deviating from policy neutrality if enhancing economic efficiency is the policy objective. Policies seeking to correct efficiency-related market failures could, for instance, support local within-sector Marshallian externalities or intra-sector spillovers, collective action to overcome sector-specific coordination failures, and the promotion of information spillovers associated with self-discovery and product diversification, based on static or dynamic knowledge, learning or other positive externalities (Harrison and Rodriguez-Clare, 2010). The presence of market failures is only a necessary and not sufficient rationale for government intervention. It is also important to ensure that the benefits to the economy from any intervention outweigh the associated costs including the costs of any government failures in the design and implementation of the intervention - linked among others to imperfect information by government of productivity-related firm needs, government capture and the creation of rents as well as outright corruption (Hevia et al., 2017).
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At the Davos forum of January 2014, a group of 14 countries pledged to launch negotiations on liberalizing trade in "green goods" (also known as "environmental" goods), focusing on the elimination of tariffs for an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation list of 54 products.
... Exibir mais + The paper shows that the Davos group, with an average tariff of 1.8 percent, has little to offer as countries have avoided submitting products with tariff peaks for tariff reductions. Even if the list were extended to the 411 products on the World Trade Organization list, taking into account tariff dispersion, the tariff structure on environmental goods would be equivalent to a uniform tariff of 3.4 percent, about half the uniform tariff-equivalent for non-environmental goods. Enlarging the number of participants to low-income countries might be possible as, on average, their imports would not increase by more than 8 percent. However, because of the strong complementarities between trade in environmental goods and trade in environmental services, these should also be brought to the negotiation table, although difficulties in reaching agreement on their scope are likely to be great.
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Documento de trabalho sobre pesquisa de políticas WPS7061 OCT 01, 2014
