Esta tese analisa a relação entre o setor externo e as mudanças ocorridas na política econômica do Brasil entre a Crise de 1913 e o fim da Primeira Guerra Mundial. O objetivo principal é estabelecer relações entre a crise financeira que teve início quando as Guerras Balcânicas envolveram interesses dos principais países da Europa Ocidental. O receio de que os confrontos nos Bálcãs provocassem mudanças na geopolítica da região levou o mercado financeiro europeu a entesourar recursos. Este entesouramento dificultou o acesso de recursos em ouro pelo Brasil. A economia brasileira era dependente do setor externo. A falta de divisas levou à redução nas exportações dos principais produtos que o Brasil comercializava no mercado internacional: café e borracha. A retração nas vendas internacionais dificultou o financiamento das importações, que foram reduzidas em percentual acima do verificado com nas exportações. A solução foi solicitar uma nova consolidação da dívida externa brasileira que entrou para a história como o segundo funding loan. A Crise de 1913 previa os eventos que se consolidariam como a Primeira Guerra Mundial. O Brasil foi forçado a modificar a sua política econômica. Novos mecanismos de atuação da economia brasileira no cenário internacional foram experimentados. A economia brasileira chegou ao fim de 1918 com novas perspectivas de atuação na economia internacional. / This thesis analyzes the relationship between the external sector and the changes in economic policy in Brazil between 1913 crisis and the end of World War I. The main objective is to establish links between the financial crisis that began when the Balkan Wars involved interests of the major Western European countries. The fear that the clashes in the Balkans provoked changes in the geopolitics of the region led the European financial market to hoard resources. This hoarding hindered the access of gold resources in Brazil. The Brazilian economy was dependent on the external sector. The lack of foreign exchange led to a reduction in exports of the main products that Brazil traded in the international market: coffee and rubber. The decline in international sales hampered the financing of imports, which were reduced by a percentage higher than that observed with exports. The solution was to request further consolidation of Brazil\'s foreign debt went down in history as the second funding loan. The Crisis 1913 predicted the events that would consolidate as the First World War. Brazil was forced to change its economic policy. New mechanisms of action of the Brazilian economy in the international arena have been tried. The Brazilian economy has ended 1918 with new perspectives of action in the international economy.

Esta tese analisa a formulação e a implementação da política econômica no Brasil durante as administrações de Jânio Quadros e João Goulart (1961-1964). O objetivo principal é compreender as razões da incapacidade do governo brasileiro para enfrentar os problemas econômicos do período, tais como a inflação e os desequilíbrios no balanço de pagamentos. Explora-se o modo pelo qual determinados grupos sociais, principalmente empresários, trabalhadores e representantes de Estados estrangeiros, interferiram nos resultados da política econômica. Por meio do uso de um amplo conjunto de fontes, abrangendo relatórios empresariais de caráter confidencial, periódicos operários, jornais comerciais e documentos dos governos brasileiro, britânico e norte-americano, conclui-se que as reações dos grupos de interesse foram fundamentais para explicar o fracasso dos planos econômicos do início dos anos 1960, apesar de cada período ter apresentado especificidades importantes. Enquanto na administração Quadros as atitudes dos empresários desempenharam um papel decisivo, na fase final da presidência de João Goulart o foco residiu no agudo conflito distributivo entre capital e trabalho, que levou ao abandono do Plano Trienal de Celso Furtado. As conclusões são relevantes na medida em que estudiosos reconhecem que a intensificação das dificuldades econômicas desse contexto tiveram um impacto decisivo na derrubada do regime político democrático em 1964, abrindo caminho para os 21 anos de regime militar no Brasil. / This thesis analyses the formulation and implementation of economic policy in Brazil during the administrations of Jânio Quadros and João Goulart (1961-1964). The main objective is to understand why the Brazilian government was unable to tackle the countrys most urgent economic problems, such as rising inflation and a mounting balance of payments crisis. To do so, the study explores the way social groups, including entrepreneurs, workers, and representatives of foreign nation states, influenced economic policy outcomes. Making use of a wide range of data from confidential employers reports, labor periodicals and commercial newspapers, through to official government sources from Brazil, the U.K. and U.S. the thesis concludes that interest groups reactions are fundamental to explaining why economic programs failed in the early 1960s. While during the administration of Jânio Quadros employers attitudes played a major role, in the final phase of João Goularts presidency, a great distributional struggle broke out between capital and labor, setting the stage for the collapse of Celso Furtados Three-Year Plan. The findings are of great relevance given scholars general recognition that the inadequacy of the Brazilian government in tackling economic problems had a decisive impact on the fall of democracy in 1964, in turn paving the way for a 21-year military dictatorship.

This dissertation seeks to develop the subject of local public finance in a manner consistent with the political economy of local governments. For ease of description, each essay will be discussed briefly. The first essay is titled "The Provision of Generalized Local Public Goods Financed by Distortionary Taxation." This essay models the provision of a local public good that is simultaneously utilized as a public consumption good and a public intermediate good. Since the public good can simultaneously enter both utility and production functions, it is considered a "generalized public good." This is done to model the provision of infrastructure by sub-federal governments, which is financed with taxes on local residents. A theoretical analysis provides a cost-benefit rule for public good provision by a rent-maximizing local government facing mobile households. Illustrative calculations of the marginal cost of public funds are provided. Calibrated to U.S. data, the role of intergovernmental transfers on the provision of infrastructure by rent-maximizing local governments is analyzed. Theoretical evidence of the higher responsiveness of local governments to matching grants relative to lump-sum grants is provided. The second essay is titled "The Impact of Local Households' Housing Tenure on Local Public Debt Levels." This essay investigates the relation between local housing tenure and local public debt. It does this by establishing housing tenure as a theoretical basis for the potential differences in how households view public debt. Homeowners capitalize the burden of local public debt into their home value, while renters do not. A hypothesis is generated that an increase in the renter share of households in a locality leads to higher levels of local public debt, all else equal. Using an instrumental variable approach, the empirical evaluation shows an increase in the proportion of renters leads to higher levels of public debt in a panel data set of U.S. local governments. Specifically, a one percentage point increase in the percent of renters increases unfunded public debt per household by $400, or about 7% of the average local debt level, and 24% of the county with the median debt level. This relationship is robust across multiple specifications. The third essay is titled "A Spatial Econometric Analysis of Local Households' Housing Tenure on Local Public Debt Levels: Implications for Federalism." This essay extends the model of the second essay by measuring the spatial spillovers using a spatial autoregressive model with autoregressive disturbances. The existence and magnitude of local government spillovers related to local public debt levels are used to inform policy makers at higher levels of government. The analysis identifies possible geographic segmentation of the municipal bond markets and the role of special district debt as a key component of the spatial distribution of local public debt. Additionally, a positive spatial disturbance is found.

Finding revenue is a challenge that faces many municipalities in the United States. As the tax base continues to decline and demand for government services increases, local governments are forced to make hard choices. Low on the list of priorities for local governments is the maintenance, and construction of infrastructure. Traditionally there have been several ways for local governments to fund long-term infrastructure projects including, federal-aid through the process of earmarking. The practice of earmarking has been around since the first congress, but hit its peak between 2003 and 2007. The earmarking process is controversial for several reasons; earmarking bypasses traditional merit procedures for distribution of federal-aid, earmarking is said to add costs to the agency awarded the funding, and earmarking has been linked to Congressional scandals and wasteful spending. In this paper I explore how an earmark, designated to local governments to fund long-term infrastructure projects, contributes to the costs of the project.

Les pays du Moyen-Orient et d’Afrique du Nord sont connus pour leurs richesses et leur diversité, conséquence d’une histoire économique et politique longue de plusieurs décennies. Ils s’étendent sur une vaste étendue allant du golfe Persique à l'est, jusqu’à l'Océan Atlantique à l'ouest. Cette région appelée parfois MENA (Middle East and North Africa) comprend la plus grande partie du Sud-Ouest de l'Asie et l'Afrique du nord. Elle inclut sur le continent asiatique l’Iran, la Turquie et tous les pays arabes. En Afrique du nord, elle inclut l’Égypte, la Tunisie, la Libye, le Maroc et l'Algérie.Cette thèse commence par une première partie consacrée à la géographie et l’histoire des principaux pays de la région en commençant par les dernières décennies vécues par l’Empire Ottoman. Dans la deuxième partie nous présentons un panorama économique et social des pays de la zone.Dans la troisième partie nous nous concentrons sur la politique monétaire. Cette politique est l'une des politiques économiques les plus importantes, car son succès est sensé contribué à la réussite et au développement d’autres politiques. Nous analysons les relations problématiques entre le gouvernement au pouvoir exécutif et la Banque centrale en tant qu’autorité monétaire. / The Countries in the Middle East and North Africa are known for their wealth and diversity as a result of a decades-long economic and political history. They extend over a vast expanse from the Persian Gulf to the east, to the Atlantic Ocean to the west. This region sometimes referred to as MENA (Middle East and North Africa) includes most of Southwest Asia and North Africa. It includes on the Asian continent Iran, Turkey and all the Arab countries. In North Africa, it includes Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Morocco and Algeria.This thesis begins with a first part devoted to the geography and history of the main countries of the region, starting with the last decades lived by the Ottoman Empire.In the second part we present an economic and social panorama of the countries of the zone.In the third part we focus on monetary policy. This policy is one of the most important economic policies, as its success is supposed to contribute to the success and development of other policies. We analyze the problematic relations between the executive government and the central bank as monetary authority.

The Renovation Program - Ðổi Mới in Vietnam since 1986 have posed a puzzling policy question: why have some policy areas experienced radical changes while others have experienced only limited and incremental changes? This policy puzzle provided the focus for this dissertation in which a model of major policy change was developed to provide a new way of explaining the policy reforms in Vietnam over the past two decades. The model was developed based on three bodies of literature: (1) the most well-developed theories and models of policy change process created in the U.S and their application to the non-U.S policy contexts; (2) the Policy-elite model as an alternative to explain the policy reforms in developing countries; (3) critical and unique regime characteristics of Vietnam that play an important role in shaping the policy contexts for the policy processes and outcomes in Vietnam. Taken together, these bodies of literature provided the basic concepts and suggested potential causal mechanism of major policy change for a conceptual framework to build a major policy change model for Vietnam. The proposed policy model identifies four policy factors (stressor, leadership predisposition, change in policy image and consensus on the political priority) that need to occur at different stages of the policy process in Vietnam to make radical change happen. Owning to the unique regime characteristics of Vietnam, the model differs from other policy process theories and models in the way that it strongly emphasizes the role of the Communist Party and the predisposition to reform embraced by the policy elites in the process of major policy change. It also reflects the collective and consensus-based policy making style of the Vietnamese Communist Party and government in the transitional period of the country. The explanatory capacity of the proposed policy model was validated by four policy case studies in higher education, international trade liberalization, state economic sector, and legal reform in foreign investment in Vietnam. The empirical evidence drawn from the case studies has affirmed the usefulness and relevance of the policy factors and the causal flow embedded in the proposed model. Concretely, the two cases with radical policy changes witnessed the presence of all four policy factors and the processes of change followed the causal arguments of the model. Whereas, in the two cases without radical changes, the legacy of a Socialist state in Vietnam has impeded the significant changes in the policy image of the policy elites in respective policy domains. As the result, no innovative policy change alternative has been advanced to the agendas of the Vietnamese government, which in turn prohibited radical policy changes in the areas of higher education and state-owned enterprise over the past two decades. In the last chapter, the cross-case comparison has found that in all four cases, there have been strong stressors and the leaders of the Vietnamese Communist Party and government have felt great pressure to reform. The Party has shown the predisposition to reform in various guiding resolutions in the four policy sectors. Yet, in the cases of higher education policy on institutional autonomy and state-owned enterprise management policy, the lack of significant change in the policy image of the leaders has been the main reason for the absence of innovative policy change. In contrast, in the cases of international trade liberalization and legal reform in setting the level playing field for enterprises of all economic sectors, all the policy factors have occurred to produce radical policy changes in these two areas.

Thesis (Ph.D. (Sociology)) --University of Limpopo, 2009 / The thesis, Gender, Structural Adjustment and Informal Economy Sector Trade in Africa: A Case Study of Women Workers in the Informal Sector of North West Province, South Africa, comprises of five chapters{PRIVATE } CHAPTER 1 is mainly introductory and deals specifically with the general orientation of the study as outlined in the background and problem statement. This chapter presents the motivation for the study, main aim and objectives and the significance of the study. It also deals with methodology and attendant problems. The chapter also addresses stages of research such as research design, population and sampling, data collection techniques, data analysis of this study. Finally the limitations of the study are outlined. CHAPTER 2 comprises the literature background for the study. The literature focuses largely on the theoretical orientation of the study and on the position of women in the economy. This chapter is divided into two parts. The first part is more general in the sense that it focuses on theorising gender using the gender approach to make a substantive argument. It also focuses on the different definitions of the informal economy sector and the impact of economic reform measures on women in the informal economy sector. This first part further argues the predominance of women in the informal economy sector. Attention in the literature is also focused on women’s employment opportunities in the informal sector and on the marginalization of women through economic reform measures introduced. Such reform measures have been advanced by government means to improve the economy. The second part attempts to illuminate some characteristics of informal work in South Africa. The unit of analysis here is women and their employment or underemployment in the economy. CHAPTER 3 focuses on the effects of macro-economic reform policies on women in the informal economy sector. This chapter discusses the current neo-liberal economic reforms (i.e. Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs); Growth Employment and Redistribution-GEAR) that have been imposed by governments all over Africa and beyond in areas such as Latin America and Asia. The chapter also indicates the negative effects of these on the poor (women in particular) and on why economic reforms have hit women hardest in the mainstream economy and in the informal sector. As a concluding argument and points raised, the chapter argues for alternative policy approaches that could be used as references to means of improving the lot of operators in the informal economy sector, especially with regard to women. The point raised in this chapter is that legislation alone does not change attitudes, traditions, trade relations and power relations. Thus, alternatives from a female perspective are outlined here to position the situation of women in terms of accessing resources in terms of the policy climate in South Africa in particular economically. From this perspective one can understand whether or not there is adequate protection and promotion of women’s rights in the economy. CHAPTER 4 consists of the empirical data for the study. The findings of the study from fieldwork on the impact of neo-liberal GEAR on women in the informal economy sector is reported, analyzed and relevant interpretations are made. The findings in this study are presented as raw totals and in percentages, where useful cross-tabulations are carried out to reflect the relevant data, which influenced the findings.Qualitative data analysis method is used to analyse data from in-depth interviews, audio and visual recordings. The data is coded and variables and their relationships are generated using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). Key words and phrases are categorised and underlined for the possibility of salient themes and summaries and possible explanatory statements are made. CHAPTER 5 gives a summary of the findings of the study and the implications thereof. A comparative survey of these findings and those discussed in the literature in chapter 2 is made. Finally, a conclusive statement is made and suggestions and recommendations for improving the informal economy sector as a valuable economic entity for women. The conclusion is that the informal economy sector does help to meet the needs of the general low income population while maintaining women’s economic activities to support their families. Thus, change on the thinking and application of socio- economic policies should start by fully refuting the more male oriented economic ideology premise on which current policy approach is based. / Council for the Development of Social Research in Africa (CODESRIA)

Thesis (MPA) --(University of Limpopo), 2007 / This study had two aims. Firstly, it investigated the existence of the Local Economic Development (LED) strategy, and secondly, the sustainability of such a strategy at the Thembisile municipality in Mpumalanga province. The rationale behind this study was to provide the municipality with possible mechanisms to improve the development and implementation of the LED policy. The concept of Local Economic Development has been studied and debated widely in South Africa. The importance of introducing policies that assist to stimulate economic activities at the local sphere of government has been acknowledged by a number of scholars. The LED policy in South Africa was developed as a way of creating a platform for municipalities to play a role in economy of the municipality and the country. This study focused on how the LED policy has been developed and implemented at the Thembisile municipality. In order to achieve this, various strategies were used to collect data. Firstly, policy documents such as the Mpumalanga Provincial Growth and Development Strategy and the Thembisile Municipality’s LED strategy were studied. Secondly, questionnaires were administered to participants. Interviews were also conducted with members of the LED Committee at the municipality and entrepreneurs. The study mainly used the Evaluation Research methods to analyze the various critical aspects of policy implementation. The results of the study show that there are possible improvements both in the development and implementation of the LED strategy at Thembisile municipality. It is also critical that the element of sustainability enterprises established should be prioritized. Finally, the study provides recommendations for improvement for the municipality.

No description available.

Neo-liberalism has become the dominant approach to economic development since the 1980s. Based on the economic principle of “efficiency”, the Washington Consensus and its supporters have avidly promoted the neoliberal orthodoxy as the ideal blueprint for the economic development of all countries in every region. However, as this thesis has discovered, the efficiency of public policy is weighed not by its conformity to an ideology but on how effective it responds to the economic and social problems of the population in question. In recent years Tonga has endured severe economic shocks which have pushed its low growth economy to the brink of economic crisis. In response to this crisis, the Government has chosen greater economic liberalisation and private sector – led growth to lead the economy to recovery. The Washington Consensus and its international supporters claim that this is the best policy response for Tonga due to the belief that greater liberalisation leads to greater efficiency. This thesis however believes that at the current dire state of the economy, it is not enough for Tongan public policy to just conform to international views on efficient economic development but to ensure that its economic development policies address the economic and social needs of the general Tongan population. With this in mind, this thesis investigated the role of agriculture in economic development. It identified that for an agriculture-based country such as Tonga, at low levels of growth, agricultural development is fundamental to long term economic growth. This research also revealed that agricultural growth is maximised through trade hence suggesting increased focus on agricultural export development. Based on these findings, this research project set out to verify the efficiency of Government agricultural policies by identifying the views of agricultural exporters and comparing these with Government approaches to agricultural export development in Tonga.