This work presents a historical analysis on the social function of the State and aims to investigate the control exercised by the sociometabolic system of capital in the phase of capitalism of monopolies, through the performance of the State. To do so, it starts from the Marxian perspective of the ontological foundations of the bourgeois state, based on a socio-historical study of the emergence of the state and its social function, as well as the development of the modern state, in its different forms of action in capitalist sociability. It promotes an analysis of the reproduction of the system of capital and the role of the modern state as a structure of political command directed at defending the interests of the economically dominant class, complementing it in an essential way in maintaining the current social order. It seeks to understand how the state in monopoly capitalism reshapes its activities and acts by guaranteeing "supposed" concessions to the working class through the provision of services in the form of rights. It addresses the nature of the structural crisis of capital and its determinations, highlighting the aspects that differentiate it from cyclical crises. Finally, it investigates ways of coping with the structural crisis of capital by the state and the consequences of the "structural adjustments" of this system to the social and working class during the neoliberal offensive of capital. From the research carried out, of a bibliographical nature, it is understood that the State, throughout the development of class societies, operates in the maintenance of the dominant mode of production through mechanisms of coercive character and control over the working class, In order to maintain and reproduce continuously the processes of production and accumulation of wealth, even though ideologically poses the defense of the interests of all men in the reproduction of the current form of sociability. / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / Este trabalho apresenta uma análise histórica sobre a função social do Estado e tem por objetivo investigar o controle exercido pelo sistema sociometabólico do capital na fase do capitalismo dos monopólios, mediante a atuação do Estado. Para tanto, parte da perspectiva marxiana dos fundamentos ontológicos do Estado burguês, com base em um estudo sócio-histórico do surgimento do Estado e sua função social, assim como do desenvolvimento do Estado moderno, nas suas diferentes formas de atuação na sociabilidade capitalista. Promove uma análise acerca da reprodução do sistema do capital e do papel do Estado moderno como uma estrutura de comando político direcionada a defender os interesses da classe economicamente dominante, complementando-a de forma essencial na manutenção da ordem social vigente. Busca entender como o Estado no capitalismo monopolista redimensiona suas atividades e atua mediante a garantia de “supostas” concessões à classe trabalhadora, através da prestação de serviços na forma de direitos. Aborda a natureza da crise estrutural do capital e suas determinações, destacando os aspectos que a diferenciam das crises cíclicas. E por último, investiga as formas de enfrentamento da crise estrutural do capital pelo Estado e as consequências dos “ajustes estruturais” desse sistema para a área social e a classe trabalhadora, durante a ofensiva neoliberal do capital. A partir da pesquisa realizada, de natureza bibliográfica, entende-se que o Estado, ao longo do desenvolvimento das sociedades de classe, opera na manutenção do modo de produção dominante por meio de mecanismos de caráter coercitivo e de controle sobre a classe trabalhadora, a fim de manter e reproduzir continuamente os processos de produção e acumulação da riqueza, ainda que postule ideologicamente a defesa dos interesses de todos os homens na reprodução da forma de sociabilidade vigente.

Submitted by MÁRCIA REGINA SOARES DE ARAUJO null (araujo_mrs@yahoo.com.br) on 2016-04-22T21:05:13Z No. of bitstreams: 1 ARAUJO, MRS 2016 FINAL.pdf: 3095554 bytes, checksum: 349f72795aff7101578c5624db06a122 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Juliano Benedito Ferreira (julianoferreira@reitoria.unesp.br) on 2016-04-26T18:34:15Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 araujo_mrs_dr_rcla.pdf: 3095554 bytes, checksum: 349f72795aff7101578c5624db06a122 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-26T18:34:15Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 araujo_mrs_dr_rcla.pdf: 3095554 bytes, checksum: 349f72795aff7101578c5624db06a122 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-02-23 / O processo de monopolização capitalista na agricultura que a região dos cerrados piauienses vivencia remete às transformações territoriais e à recomposição no território de ordem técnica e orgânica. Essa reestruturação territorial adorna fatores que induzem as cidades preexistentes a se revestirem de acordo com as dinâmicas oriundas do campo. Nesse sentido, a presente Tese tem como objetivo central compreender as novas dinâmicas do espaço rural/urbano dos cerrados nordestinos decorrentes do avanço recente do agronegócio na região, em particular o município piauiense de Uruçuí. A metodologia empregada neste trabalho constou de levantamento bibliográfico, pesquisa de campo, construção de dados a partir de instituições públicas e privadas, observação direta, diário de campo, levantamento cartográfico e iconográfico; por fim, a elaboração da tese. A trilha metodológica percorrida propiciou a constatação de elementos aparentemente dissimétricos, como homogeneização e desigualdade que aparecem fartamente nas determinações territoriais do município. A homogeneização das paisagens é reflexo da agricultura mundializada e se traduz na constituição de uma paisagem monocromática. No âmbito das relações sociais de poder, as ações hegemonizantes do capital obliteram parcela significativa da comunidade local desse processo. Como um dos elementos fundadores da dinâmica econômica presente no município está a aplicação de recursos que dizem respeito aos créditos agrícolas, e que despertou o interesse de produtores capitalizados das mais diversas regiões do País. Outro fator ímpar que garante a constatação da desigualdade social se refere ao comportamento altamente concentrador da estrutura fundiária da região. Ao longo do trabalho. foi possível identificar as determinações territoriais da lógica da produção de commodities impressas nesse município, pela ação do capital monopolista e financeiro. Essas determinações também oportunizaram observar claramente que o pêndulo das oportunidades se direcionam em grande medida para os sujeitos que aportam no município providos de capital. A administração pública ineficiente e a baixa absorção de mão de obra por parte do setor privado demonstram quão segregador é esse processo. A inadimplência, a falta de oportunidades e o alijamento da população camponesa, homens e mulheres não conseguem dialogar com o discurso de desenvolvimento e prosperidade, ventilada aos quatro cantos do país pelo discurso hegemônico. A realidade é que a produção nos cerrados piauienses tem, de fato, alcançado patamares elevados de produção e produtividade; no entanto, a promoção de ganhos é unilaterial, o que amplia os desníveis e injustiças sociais dos quais grande parcela da comunidade local é vítima. / The process of capitalist monopolization in agriculture which the region of the Savannas of Piauí experience refer to territorial transformations, and a recomposition in the territory of technical and organic reasons. This territorial restructuring adorns several factors that induce the pre-existing towns to adapt according to the dynamics from the field. In this regard, this thesis is mainly aimed to understand the new dynamics of rural-urban area of northeastern savannas arising from the recent development of agribusiness in the region, in particularly a town called Uruçui. The methodology employed in this work consisted of bibliographic survey, field research, construction of data from public and private institutions, direct observation, field jornal, cartographic and iconographic survey and, finally, the elaboration of the thesis. The methodological tools used provided the observation of elements apparently dissymmetric as homogenization and inequality that appear widely in the territorial regulations of the town. The homogenization of landscapes is a reflection of the mundialization of the agriculture and translates in the constitution of a monochromatic landscape. Within the framework of social relations of power, the hegomonic actions of the capital obliterate significant portion of the local community in this process. As one of the founding elements of economic dynamics present in the municipality is the application of resources relating to agricultural credits that aroused the interest of capitalized producers from different regions of the country. Another unique factor that ensures the evidence of social inequality refers to high concentrator behavior of the agrarian structure of the region. Over the course of the work it was possible to identify territorial determinations of the logic of production of commodities demonstrated in this municipality by monopoly capital and financial action. These determinations also nurture observe clearly the pendulum guide opportunities largely for producers who come in the municipality with capital. The inefficient public administration and low absorption of labour by private sector demonstrate how segregated is this process. Failury pay, lack of opportunities and the decrease of the rural population, men and women are unable to engage in dialogue of development and prosperity spread to the all corners of the country by the hegemonic discourse. In fact, The reality is that production on the savanas of Piauí has achieved high levels of production and productivity, however, the promotion of gains is unilateral which broadens gaps and social injustices from which large portion of the local community is the victim.

Cette thèse porte sur les difficultés d'accès aux soins dentaires dans le marché français semi-régulé. L'analyse cible la barrière financière d'accès aux soins dentaires et ainsi le rôle et le mécanisme de fixation des prix. La première partie permet de contextualiser la délivrance des soins dentaires en France et montre que la profession de chirurgiens-dentistes est particulièrement isolée dans le domaine sanitaire français. L'objet de la seconde partie est d'identifier les déterminants de l'accès aux soins dentaires. Nous montrons que le programme de prévention pour les enfants M'T'dents, entièrement gratuit, n'était utilisé que par les ménages les plus aisés et touchait peu les ménages défavorisés qui en ont le plus besoin. L'importance du support social dans l'accès aux soins est aussi affirmée dans notre seconde étude empirique. L'accès primaire aux soins dentaires des adultes présente la principale barrière d'accès. Une fois cette difficulté surmontée, les patients engagent le plus souvent les traitements suivants nécessaires, avec des niveaux de dépenses qui peuvent être importants même pour les moins aisés. À la suite de ces résultats, nous nous sommes intéressés spécifiquement au rôle du prix. Nous avons montré que plus le prix des prothèses dentaires était élevé, plus le renoncement à ces soins pour raisons financières était important. D'après nos travaux, l'intensité de la concurrence impacte négativement la fixation des prix contrairement à la solvabilité de la demande. Les prix entre concurrents sont aussi des compléments stratégiques. Ce sont autant de facteurs susceptibles d'être régulés pour lutter contre le renoncement aux soins dentaires et les inégalités sociales de santé qui en résultent. / This thesis concerns the difficulties to access dental care in the semi-regulated French market. The analysis targets the financial barrier of access to dental care and so the role and the mechanism of price setting. The first part gives the background of the French dental care delivery and shows that the profession of dental surgeons is particularly isolated in the French sanitary domain. In the second part we identify the decisive factors of the dental care access. We show that the free preventive program for the children Lov'Ur'Teeth was used only by the wealthiest and affected little the most disadvantaged households, which need it much more. The decisive impact of the social support in access to dental care is also a strong result in our second empirical study. The primary access to the dental treatment presents the main barrier of access. When people overcome this difficulty, they mostly continue the ensuing necessary treatments, that could be very expensive. Following these results, we focused in the role of the price. We showed that the more the prosthetic prices are high, the more is the renunciation for these cares. According to our works, the intensity of the competition impacts negatively the price setting, contrary to the demand's solvency. The prices between competitors are also strategic complements. That are many potential factors to be regulated to fight against the dental unmet need and the resulting social health inequalities.

La concurrence est en voie d’extinction dans l’industrie de la Presse Quotidienne Régionale en France et des grands journaux « metropolitan » des Etats-Unis. La concurrence est un débat économique et sociétal récurrent dès qu’il s’agit de médias. La pluralité des voix est considérée à tort ou à raison comme un des piliers de la démocratie représentative. Elle est protégée par des lois en France et aux Etats-Unis visant à réguler la concentration. Force est de constater que ces textes restent sans efficacité sur le terrain. Les économistes sont partagés quant à l’effet de la concentration sur les affaires. Certains soulignent une baisse du lectorat//audience dans les départements en situation de monopole. La corrélation dominante cause/effet n’a jamais été prouvée, dans la mesure où le déclin de la presse a d’autres raisons. Les partisans de la concentration avancent les avantages financiers de cette situation, principalement des économies d’échelle et la possibilité de fixer les prix hors de la réalité d’un marché concurrentiel. Mais cette époque est révolue. Notre sujet est pourtant pionnier au sens où la concurrence redevient la règle sur le marché de le publicité numérique et également des «informations ». Des starts-up se multiplient aux Etats-Unis défiant les groupes historiques dans une compétition certes encore très asymétrique, La France semble toujours en retard quant à cette émergence d’entrepreneurs régionaux. A travers des études de cas, nous tenterons de prouver que la concurrence marketing et éditoriale a encore un effet dopant sur les ventes « papier » (compétition Ouest-France et Télégramme ou sur Chicago à moindre échelle). / Due to concentration, in the United States and France, competition is about to be eradicated in the local and metropolitan newspaper industry. Some scholars regret the lack of pluralism which is historically the function of the press in a representative democracy. Pluralism is highly regulated by the states, but laws could not prevent concentration. Economists are divided about the impact of concentration regarding business. Some point out that circulation has dropped in newly monopolistic areas. But they do not provide the undoubtedly proof of a correlation between those two facts. Economies of scale and financial benefits (price-fixing) of a monopolistic position may justify concentration on an economic level. Some companies have enjoyed double-digit profit while in a monopolistic position. But this time is over. The emergence of the Internet has generated a highly competitive market regarding advertising and news business. Our topic is thus not lamenting the good old days of competition, but it is pioneering. In the United States, many start-ups, mostly non-profit, challenge the legacy regional and metropolitan newsgroups the same way that already big groups do nationwide, such as Buzzfeed or Quartz or Vox. Entrepreneurs, in a Schumpeterian meaning, strive to replace stagecoach owners and build the railways of the future. The trend is much less clear in the French case.Our research wants to assert that marketing and full editorial competition still boosts circulation and business (Brittany in France) and is an unavoidable rendezvous for the legacy groups in the digital news era because they are forced to abandon the corporate culture of the past.

This thesis consists of four self-contained essays. The common theme of the essays is the behavior of multi-plant firms. An underlying idea in all four of them is that firms possess intangible assets such as management skills and organizational expertise, technological knowledge, marketing know-how and better access to finance capital or natural resources. These assets are typically specific to the respective firm. Due to market imperfections and failures, firms tend to internalize the advantages of firm-specific assets and exploit them themselves rather than sell or lease them to other firms. For instance, intangible assets are often joint inputs in the sense that knowledge developed by one unit can be transferred to another unit within the same firm at a low cost and without diminishing the amount of knowledge available to the first unit. Furthermore, the assets are typically only partly appropriable by their owner, and the market transactions of the assets are hampered due to information asymmetries between a potential buyer and seller. The literature on multinational firms emphasizes the role of intangible firm-specific assets in creating ownership advantages that, together with location and internalization advantages, explain the pattern of foreign direct investments. The essays in this thesis are based on the view that the ownership advantages created by firm-specific assets are the "raison d'etre" of large multi-plant firms. The existence of such assets is assumed to create multi-plant economies of scale and give incentives to make better use of capacity or overheads to gain advantage in size, economies of interdependent activities, integration and/or diversification. Rather than studying the international aspects of firms with intangible assets, the first three essays empirically explore different aspects of multi-plant firm behavior in domestic markets. This analysis has been made possible by the access to unique plant-level data on the thirty largest multinational manufacturing corporations in Sweden. The sample corporations play an important role in the Swedish economy. For instance, the thirty corporations account for about 70 percent of aggregate industrial R&D in 1999. This should be compared with their share of total manufacturing employment, which was about 30 percent during the period of study. The first essay examines the sources of productivity growth within multi-plant firms and particularly emphasizes the role of external restructuring and ownership changes in explaining why multi-plant firms may sustain higher productivity growth as compared to single-plant firms. The second and the third essay explore the idea that large multi-plant corporations exploit their ownership advantages when acquiring partial- and full-firm assets. The second essay analyzes whether technological intangible assets may explain transfers of productive capacity from acquiring corporations to their target. The third essay explores the idea that multi-plant corporations search for targets matching their firm-specific organizational capabilities when acquiring corporate assets. Uncertainty about the matching outcome explains why some acquisitions end in divestitures. However, the likelihood of a "good" match is expected to increase in the buyer's organizational capabilities. The fourth essay, coauthored with Karolina Ekholm, extends the analysis to encompass the international aspects of multinational firms. In this essay, we develop a theoretical model analyzing the localization decisions of multi-plant firms beyond the national borders. More specifically, we develop a two-country model where firms can choose to separate their innovative activities generating an intangible asset from the production of the final good. In our model, there are two agglomeration forces: knowledge spillovers associated with R&D and backward and forward linkages associated with high-tech production. We analyze how the interplay of these forces affects the localization decisions of the firms. / Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögsk., 2003

My dissertation is a collection of three essays that study various aspects of non-price competition among firms using fully microfounded general equilibrium models. The first two chapters, both coauthored with Benedetto Molinari, introduce advertising expenditures by firms into a dynamic and stochastic general equilibrium model (DSGE), in order to address the question of whether and how aggregate advertising expenditures provide important effects upon the aggregate economy. In particular, the first chapter provides a short-run analysis, by focusing on the implications of aggregate adverting expenditure upon the business cycle. The second chapter, in turn, focuses on long-run effects of advertising, by analyzing the implications upon the steady-state equilibrium of aggregate advertising expenditures by firms. The last chapter, by using a modified version of the canonical New Keynesian model, investigates the effect upon inflation dynamics of non-price competition among firms. / Esta tesis contiene tres ensayos que estudian varios aspectos de la competencia no en precio entre las impresas, utilizando modelos de equilibrio general micro-fundados. En los primeros dos capítulos, ambos coautorados con Benedetto Molinari, se introducen gastos en publicidad de las empresas en un modelo dinámico y estocástico de equilibrio general, a través del cual, se estudian las implicaciones de la publicidad en la economía agregada. El primer capítulo se focaliza en los efectos de corto plazo de la publicidad, analizando las implicaciones con respecto al ciclo económico. El segundo capítulo, estudia los efectos de largo plazo de la publicidad, con el objetivo de analizar las implicaciones sobra el estado estacionario del economía. En el último capítulo se utiliza una versión modificada del modelo Neo-Keynesiano que estudia los efectos de la competencia no en precio en relación la dinámica de la inflación.

The privatisation and liberalisation of telecommunications throughout the world has resulted in the growing involvement of competition authorities in telecommunications regulation, alongside telecommunications sector-specific regulators. The existence of both sector specific rules and competition rules has brought about a critical institutional challenge. The increased role of competition authorities in the telecommunications sector raises the issue of inconsistent jurisdiction in the sector. Conflicts are therefore inevitable in the absence of clear delineation of jurisdiction. The South African model for regulation in the telecommunications sector entails a sharing of jurisdiction between the sector-specific regulator, the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA), and the competition-wide regulator, the Competition Commission. The study thus determines the interplay between the Competition Commission and ICASA as well as the competitiveness of South African telecommunications. / Communication Science / M.A. (International Communication))

The privatisation and liberalisation of telecommunications throughout the world has resulted in the growing involvement of competition authorities in telecommunications regulation, alongside telecommunications sector-specific regulators. The existence of both sector specific rules and competition rules has brought about a critical institutional challenge. The increased role of competition authorities in the telecommunications sector raises the issue of inconsistent jurisdiction in the sector. Conflicts are therefore inevitable in the absence of clear delineation of jurisdiction. The South African model for regulation in the telecommunications sector entails a sharing of jurisdiction between the sector-specific regulator, the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA), and the competition-wide regulator, the Competition Commission. The study thus determines the interplay between the Competition Commission and ICASA as well as the competitiveness of South African telecommunications. / Communication Science / M.A. (International Communication))