The Oxford Handbook Of The Brazilian Economy

Brazil is a globally vital but troubled economy. This volume offers comprehensive insight into Brazil's economic development, focusing on its most salient characteristics and analyzing its structural features across various dimensions. This innovative Oxford Handbook provides an understanding of the economy's evolution over time and highlights the implications of the past trajectory and decisions for current challenges and opportunities. The opening section covers the country's economic history, beginning with the colonial economy, through import-substitution, to the era of neoliberalism. Second, it analyses Brazil's broader place in the global economy, and considers the ways in which this role has changed, and is likely to change, over coming years. Particular attention is given to the productive sectors of Brazil's economy, for example manufacturing, agriculture, services, energy, and infrastructure. In addition to discussions of regional differences within Brazil, socio-economic dimensions are examined. These include income distribution, human capital, environmental issues, and health. Also included is a discussion of Brazil in the world economy, such as the increase in "South-South" cooperation and trade as well as foreign direct investment. Last but not least is a discussion of the role of the Brazilian state in the economy, whether through state enterprises, competition policy, or corruption.

A comprehensive overview of the key factors affecting the development of Latin American economies that examines long-term growth performance, macroeconomic issues, Latin American economies in the global context, technological and agricultural policies, and the evolution of labour markets, the education sector, and social security programmes.

Latin America's recent development performance calls for a multidisciplinary analytical tool kit. This handbook accordingly adopts a political-economy perspective to understand Latin American economies. This perspective is not new to the region; indeed, this volume consciously follows the approach pioneered by political economist Albert O. Hirschman a half century ago. But the nature of the political and economic processes at work in Latin America has changed dramatically since Hirschman's critical contribution. Military dictatorships have given way to an uneven democratic consolidation; agricultural or primary-product producers have transformed into middle-income, diversified economies, some of which are leading examples of emerging markets. So, too, the tools of political-economy have developed by leaps and bounds. It is therefore worthwhile to take stock of, and considerably extend, the explosion of recent scholarship on the two-way interaction between political processes and economic performance. A unique feature of the book is that it begins with a group of chapters written by high-level academic experts on Latin American economics and policies who also happen to be current or past economic policy makers in the region, including Fernando Henrique Cardoso (former president of Brazil), Andr?s Velasco (former Chilean finance minister), Luis Carranza (former Peruvian finance minister), Mart?n Redrado (former governor of the Argentina central bank) and Luciano Coutinho (president of Brazil's national development bank). These contributors draw upon their academic expertise to understand their experience in the trenches of policy making.

This handbook provides a comprehensive analysis of business groups around the world. It focuses on the adaptive and competitive capabilities of business groups and their evolutionary dynamics, as well as considering the historical and theoretical contexts of business groups.

This Oxford Handbook provides a fresh overall view and interpretation of the modern economic growth of one of the largest European countries, whose economic history is less known internationally than that of other comparably large and successful economies. It will provide, for the first time, a comprehensive, quantitative "new economic history" of Italy. The handbook offers an interpretation of the main successes and failures of the Italian economy at a macro level, the research--conducted by a large international team of scholars --contains entirely new quantitative results and interpretations, spanning the entire 150-year period since the unification of Italy, on a large number of issues. By providing a comprehensive view of the successes and failures of Italian firms, workers, and policy makers in responding to the challenges of the international business cycle, the book crucially shapes relevant questions on the reasons for the current unsatisfactory response of the Italian economy to the ongoing "second globalization." Most chapters of the handbook are co-authored by both an Italian and a foreign scholar.

By 1999, Russia's economy was growing at almost 7% per year, and by 2008 reached 11th place in the world GDP rankings. Russia is now the world's second largest producer and exporter of oil, the largest producer and exporter of natural gas, and as a result has the third largest stock of foreign exchange reserves in the world, behind only China and Japan. But while this impressive economic growth has raised the average standard of living and put a number of wealthy Russians on the Forbes billionaires list, it has failed to solve the country's deep economic and social problems inherited from the Soviet times. Russia continues to suffer from a distorted economic structure, with its low labor productivity, heavy reliance on natural resource extraction, low life expectancy, high income inequality, and weak institutions. While a voluminous amount of literature has studied various individual aspects of the Russian economy, in the West there has been no comprehensive and systematic analysis of the socialist legacies, the current state, and future prospects of the Russian economy gathered in one book. The Oxford Handbook of the Russian Economy fills this gap by offering a broad range of topics written by the best Western and Russian scholars of the Russian economy. While the book's focus is the current state of the Russian economy, the first part of the book also addresses the legacy of the Soviet command economy and offers an analysis of institutional aspects of Russia's economic development over the last decade. The second part covers the most important sectors of the economy. The third part examines the economic challenges created by the gigantic magnitude of regional, geographic, ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity of Russia. The fourth part covers various social issues, including health, education, and demographic challenges. It will also examine broad policy challenges, including the tax system, rule of law, as well as corruption and the underground economy. Michael Alexeev and Shlomo Weber provide for the first time in one volume a complete, well-rounded, and essential look at the complex, emerging Russian economy.

First reference on food consumption and policy.

With contributions from leading international scholars, this Handbook offers the most rigorous and up-to-date analyses of virtually every aspect of Brazilian politics, including inequality, environmental politics, foreign policy, economic policy making, social policy, and human rights. The Handbook is divided into three major sections: Part 1 focuses on mass behavior, while Part 2 moves to representation, and Part 3 treats political economy and policy. The Handbook proffers five chapters on mass politics, focusing on corruption, participation, gender, race, and religion; three chapters on civil society, assessing social movements, grass-roots participation, and lobbying; seven chapters focusing on money and campaigns, federalism, retrospective voting, partisanship, ideology, the political right, and negative partisanship; five chapters on coalitional presidentialism, participatory institutions, judicial politics, and the political character of the bureaucracy, and eight chapters on inequality, the environment, foreign policy, economic and industrial policy, social programs, and human rights. This Handbook is an essential resource for students, researchers, and all those looking to understand contemporary Brazilian politics.