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The aim of this paper is to analyze the impact of food insecurity on the school performance of Brazilian students. Therefore, the empirical approach used to correct the selection bias was the Propensity Score Matching (PSM), based on the data from the National Household Sample Survey (PNAD) in 2013. The main results indicate that food insecurity has a statistically significant and positive impact on agegrade distortion (school performance proxy). The effect for any level of food insecurity is approximately 4%, however, it intensifies as the degree of food insecurity increases, being 11% in the case of students classified as having severe food insecurity. This study provides the first empirical evidence for Brazil that food insecurity is associated with the academic performance of Brazilian students, a fact that can compromise the country's social and economic development in the long run. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this paper is to examine the relationship between fiscal and monetary policy coordination and fiscal multipliers in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico. To do so, we first look at the theoretical framework of the New Consensus Macroeconomics (NCM), and then analyze the trends in the four countries for variables including consumption, investment, government spending, and interest rates. Finally, we present an estimate of the spending and monetary multipliers with proxy variables. The contribution of this paper consists of one, showing the inexistence of the crowding out effect, and two, quantifying the multipliers for the aforementioned countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many international analysts claimed that the Brazilian protests of June 2013 were a consequence of the country's rapid economic growth over the past few years, the rise of new middle classes, the heighten of expectations on government, the increase of citizen participation and the weakness of political institutions to handle all the above-mentioned situations. This explanation relied, explicitly or implicitly, on the modernization theory of Samuel P. Huntington, despite the fact more than forty years have gone by since the first appearance of Political order in changing societies (1968) -Huntington's most famous book on the political impacts of modernization. The purpose of this paper is to question whether Huntington's causality model actually explains the Brazilian protests. In order to do this, ethnographies of the protests that pay particular attention to their causes are contrasted with the model raised by Huntington. Based on the above, the scopes and limits of the modernization theory to explain contemporary social movements are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]