Criado pelo Banco Mundial, no bojo das políticas neoliberais de ajuste estrutural, e adotado pelo Estado brasileiro na década de 1990, o modelo de reforma agrária de mercado representa uma tentativa de contensão das tensões sociais no campo por meio da desmobilização dos movimentos sociais de luta pela terra. No entanto, os desdobramentos nocivos dessas ações políticas vão além. A implementação desse modelo, dito de reforma agrária, representa ainda: a expansão do capital financeiro no campo; o aquecimento do mercado de terras e da especulação; inaugura uma nova modalidade de recriação do campesinato, protagonizada pelo mercado; e cria um conflito entre a lógica capitalista de propriedade privada da terra e a concepção de terra de trabalho, na visão camponesa. A presente pesquisa visa analisar a inserção do modelo de reforma agrária de mercado nos municípios de Londrina e Tamarana, localizados na região Norte do estado do Paraná, por meio da análise da produção do espaço agrário dos referidos municípios que favoreceu a penetração do modelo; da avaliação das políticas de desenvolvimento rural propostas pelo Banco Mundial e adotadas pelo Estado brasileiro; e, por meio da análise de elementos, como: sujeição da renda camponesa da terra ao capital, reprodução social e material das famílias assentadas e conflitos existentes no interior das diferentes formas de sociabilidade dos camponeses, verificamos a inviabilidade dos assentamentos rurais criados a partir dos programas de reforma agrária de mercado, pautados na ótica neoliberal de desenvolvimento rural do Banco Mundial. / Created by the World Bank, in the midst of the neoliberal policies of structural adjustment, and adopted by the Brazilian state in the 1990s, the model of market agrarian reform represents an attempt at containment of social tensions in rural areas through the demobilization of social movements fighting the land. However, the harmful consequences of these actions go beyond policies. The implementation of this model, called the \"land reform\", is still: the expansion of financial capital in the field, the \"warming\" of the land market and speculation, inaugurates a new mode of recreation of the peasantry, led by the market and creates a conflict between the logic of capitalist private ownership of land and the design of earth work, vision peasant. This research aims to analyze the inclusion of the model of agrarian market reform in the municipalities of Londrina and Tamarana, located in northern Paraná state, through the analysis of agricultural production space of those counties that favored the penetration of the model; of evaluation of rural development policies proposed by the World Bank and adopted by the Brazilian State, and, through the analysis of elements, such as subjecting the income of peasant land to capital, material and social reproduction of families settled and conflicts within the various forms of sociability of the peasants, we see the inevitability of rural settlements created from the agrarian reform programs in the market, lined the neoliberal perspective on rural development under the World Bank.

In the last two decades, more than half of the countries in the world have introduced a reform process in their power industries and billions of dollars have been spent on liberalizing electricity markets around the world. This thesis presents a doctoral research concerned with the cross-country empirical analysis of the electricity market reforms. The thesis is in three-paper format; that is, we present three independent but related stand-alone papers. The first paper focuses on the impact of power market reforms on electricity price-cost margins and industrial/residential price ratios. It investigates this issue by looking at the impact of the electricity industry reforms on residential and industrial electricity price-cost margins and their effect on industrial/residential price ratios. Using panel data from 63 developed and developing countries covering the period 1982–2009, empirical models are developed and analysed. The results suggest that each individual reform step has different impact on price-cost margins and industrial/residential price ratios for each consumer and country group. That is to say, our findings imply that similar reform steps may have different impacts in different countries, which supports the idea that reform prescription for a specific country cannot easily be transferred to another one with similar success. The second paper explores whether the question of why some countries are able to implement more extensive reforms is closely related to the question of why some countries have better institutions than others. It analyses this question by using an empirical econometric model based on Poisson regression with cross-section data covering 51 states in US, 13 provinces in Canada and 51 other countries. The study concludes that both the background of the chairperson and the minister/governor and institutional endowments of a country are important determinants of how far reforms have gone in a country. Considering the fact that ideological considerations, political composition of governments and educational/professional background of leaders have played and will play a crucial role throughout the reform process; the third paper attempts to discover the impact of political economic variables on the liberalization process in electricity markets. It develops and analyses empirical models using panel data from 55 developed and developing countries covering the period 1975–2010. The results suggest that a portion of the differences in the reform experiences of reforming countries in the past three decades can be explained by differences in the political structure, in the ideology of the government and in the professional and educational backgrounds of the political leaders.

Local electricity markets can be defined broadly as 'future electricity market designs involving domestic customers, demand-side response and energy storage'. Like current deregulated electricity markets, these localised derivations present specific stochastic optimisation problems in which the dynamic and random nature of the market is intertwined with the physical needs of its participants. Moreover, the types of contracts and constraints in this setting are such that 'games' naturally emerge between the agents. Advanced modelling techniques beyond classical mathematical finance are therefore key to their analysis. This thesis aims to study contracts in these local electricity markets using the mathematical theories of stochastic optimal control and games. Chapter 1 motivates the research, provides an overview of the electricity market in Great Britain, and summarises the content of this thesis. It introduces three problems which are studied later in the thesis: a simple control problem involving demand-side management for domestic customers, and two examples of games within local electricity markets, one of them involving energy storage. Chapter 2 then reviews the literature most relevant to the topics discussed in this work. Chapter 3 investigates how electric space heating loads can be made responsive to time varying prices in an electricity spot market. The problem is formulated mathematically within the framework of deterministic optimal control, and is analysed using methods such as Pontryagin's Maximum Principle and Dynamic Programming. Numerical simulations are provided to illustrate how the control strategies perform on real market data. The problem of Chapter 3 is reformulated in Chapter 4 as one of optimal switching in discrete-time. A martingale approach is used to establish the existence of an optimal strategy in a very general setup, and also provides an algorithm for computing the value function and the optimal strategy. The theory is exemplified by a numerical example for the motivating problem. Chapter 5 then continues the study of finite horizon optimal switching problems, but in continuous time. It also uses martingale methods to prove the existence of an optimal strategy in a fairly general model. Chapter 6 introduces a mathematical model for a game contingent claim between an electricity supplier and generator described in the introduction. A theory for using optimal switching to solve such games is developed and subsequently evidenced by a numerical example. An optimal switching formulation of the aforementioned game contingent claim is provided for an abstract Markovian model of the electricity market. The final chapter studies a balancing services contract between an electricity transmission system operator (SO) and the owner of an electric energy storage device (battery operator or BO). The objectives of the SO and BO are combined in a non-zero sum stochastic differential game where one player (BO) uses a classic control with continuous effects, whereas the other player (SO) uses an impulse control (discontinuous effects). A verification theorem proving the existence of Nash equilibria in this game is obtained by recursion on the solutions to Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman variational PDEs associated with non-zero sum controller-stopper games.