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The school attendance of 4-5 years-old children raised from 3.7% to 78.9% between 1970 and 2018 in Brazil. This paper analyses the preschool expansion process in Brazil in the last 50 years, documenting the preschool attendance and discussing how sociodemographic and institutional factors usually associated with the expansion are related to the process. The paper shows that female labor force participation, public investments, and demographic factors were to some extent important but not crucial to the expansion of pre-school attendance in Brazil. Furthermore, the observed expansion seems to be a result of uncoordinated and unplanned policies implemented in the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effect of fiscal policy over business cycles has been a source of major controversy despite the growing empirical literature and international experience. This paper proposes an analytical framework that allows us to analyze the transmission channels of fiscal policy, updating the most recent findings after the pandemic. In this way, it aims to contribute to a more detailed understanding of some of the main mechanisms by which fiscal policy affects the economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Worsening joblessness in India is put forward here from the multiple and interconnected argumentative lens of formal-informal dichotomy by labour productivity differential, market size constraint, labour market flexibility, capital inflows, political constraint, corporate industrialization and welfare economic implications. In the process, the limitations of the classic developmental ideas of Kuznets, Lewis and Schumpeter are critiqued. Thereafter, an alternative policy framework is proposed to achieve economic development focused on employment, equity and environmental uplift. The paper shows how the massive unemployment problem can be managed in India's democratic set up by departing from conventional wisdom about industrialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Commodity dependence is a long-lasting feature of South American economies, with far reaching effects in economic and social performance. This paper focuses in the interaction between commodity prices and real exchange rate and in its effects on productive capabilities. New-Developmentalist approach has labeled that situation as a "Dutch-Disease". I propose a Balance of Payment Constraint Growth model especially designed to address some specificities of commodity dependence that allow to theoretically analyze this issue. Empirical tests are conducted for the period 1970-2017. It is found that price surges are damaging for productive capabilities only in the context of the dismantling of state intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Maria da Conceição Tavares was one of the most notable development economists in Brazil. She studied economics at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and at CEPAL, where she became an economist and author always mentioned when talking about the structuralist school of CEPAL. She was a professor at Unicamp and UFRJ, where she studied. Among her friends are top economists such as Celso Furtado, Antonio Barros de Castro, Carlos Lessa, and Luiz Gonzaga Belluzzo. The Journal of Political Economy published seven of her articles in her honor after her death on June 8, 2024. [Extracted from the article]

At the end of the 1970s, the People's Republic of China (PRC) promoted policies to attract investments from the developed capitalist world, aiming for technological transfer and offering a profitable environment in exchange. Although the TNC capital, know-how, and technology have been key factors for Chinese development, the State has planned and regulated those investments, so they can be aligned with an autonomous project of development, avoiding the classic centre-periphery dependency relationship. This paper analysis focuses on the Five-Year Plans, and the regulation policy laws for inward investment. At the end we analyse the FDI data, which allowed us to identify the main changes and distinct phases of the development of FDI and the State policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses some comparative analysis between the pattern of economic performances in Asia and Western Europe during 1950s-2020s through political economies perspective. The Asian and Western European economic performances are investigated through some stylized facts in the sense of economic factors. Three analyses are used to explain the general pattern of these regions. First, this study examines the pattern of GDP growth per capita during the 1950s-2020s, focusing on several countries in this region. Second, the analysis captures the pattern of linkages of economic variables in this region related to the principle of Circular and Cumulative causation (CCC) and contradiction. Third, the analysis employs a historical perspective underpinned by the results in the second analysis. This third analysis is crucial to appreciating Asia's global economic performance and also the process of Western deterioration phenomenon through long wave, including the occurrence recession and financial crises. The institutions of globalization and neoliberalism that put the power of capital promoted a financial crisis several times during the decades of 1980s-2020. The financial crisis is depicted by contradictions in the structural linkages among economic factors in Western Europe over the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the applicability of economic policies and other developmentalist governmental actions to financialized economies. It mobilizes the theoretical-methodological regulationist principles for a historical and institutional macro-analysis. After a brief review of the concepts of the Regulation School, including the "economic policy regime" (Théret, 1992; Lordon, 2002; Boyer, 2015), the Brazilian case is analyzed as a remarkable example of institutional compatibility with rentier-financial accumulation to the detriment of the accumulation of productive fixed capital. Several indicators of this case are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the expansion of social policies in South Korea during the context of globalization, by linking two theoretical approaches: social investment and the New Developmental State. Applying the case study method, I endorse the hypothesis of complementarily between the welfare state and the developmental state. The article shows that between the 1990s and the 2010s, South Korea expanded all sectors of social policies analyzed. Beyond the expansion of passive policies, active policies (including education) were reshaped in an integrated manner with the industrial policy to promote innovation, pursuing the transition to the knowledge-based society; also the family policy became one of the most generous among OECD countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper rescues Deirdre McCloskey's ideas about Rhetoric in Economics and some issues left out in subsequent discussions. There is a parallel between the ideas of McCloskey and Bruno Latour, and the complementarities of their perspectives are very relevant for the development of Economics. Some reflections are here offered to improve the practice of Economics, which are related to the social constructions of facts in the field, to the internalization of political aspects, and to the importance of alternating between fact and fiction in a dynamic that does not result in a zero-sum game, underlining the characteristic of Economics as being inherently rhetorical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper starts gathering historical evidence related to eventual regulation/deregulation cycles in the two first decades of the XXth and XXIth centuries. Following, an analysis on the passageway of the Medieval Man to a Liberal Man in Europe, and on the economic and political features of the Classical Liberalism in its path to Neoliberalism. Later on, a search for answers to the recent disarrangements and authoritarian trends in the world. Many critics were made to Neoliberalism as well as speculations on the future of this system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]