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ABSTRACT The recent expansion of tree plantations is the most important agrarian change in many parts of Brazil. This article uses the results of extensive field research to analyse the different ways paper and pulp companies assure their land base for eucalyptus plantations. The mechanisms of land access have changed little over the decades, amounting to a process of primitive accumulation which seems to be controlled by the ways the pulp industry influences land markets and prices, the strength of any resistance, and particularly the government support enjoyed by industry. Many paper and steel companies, either directly or indirectly, are increasingly relying on eucalyptus plantations, with negative impacts in many places. The expansion of tree monocultures with rural exclusion is characteristic of the wider phenomenon of land grab which is driven by the dominating financial logic of current capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Minerals Technologies Inc is expanding its satellite precipitated calcium carbonate (PCC) plant at a paper mill owned by Suzano Papel é Celulose SA in Suzano, Brazil. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In 2014, Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-first Century" rocked the economic and political world, with its argument that inequality is destined to increase; in the field of education, however, this book has been almost entirely ignored. I argue that Piketty's treatise is relevant to educational theories for three reasons: his rejection of meritocracy contributes to theories of social mobility; his critique of human capital theory provides fodder for debates about educational purpose; and his interdisciplinary analysis supports the political economy tradition in education. However, I also argue that it is necessary to move beyond the economic determinism in Piketty's arguments, to explore the transformative potential of education as a consciousness-raising process, the agency of communities, the production process, and alternative solutions to inequality. I argue that education scholars should use the renewed interest in inequality generated by Piketty's book to shift the dominant discourses about education, schools, and social justice.

This paper analyzes the effects of a higher education accountability system in Brazil. For each discipline, colleges were assigned a grade that depended on the scores of their students on the ENC, an annual mandatory exam. These grades were then disclosed to the public and colleges were rewarded or penalized based on them. I find that the ENC had a positive effect on the education and the proportion of full-time faculty and that it increased the number of vacancies offered, applicants and enrollments. Colleges were affected differently depending on grades, ownership and academic organization, changing the distribution of students among them.

In this paper we argue that the primary force behind the large drop in real exchange rates that occurs after large devaluations is the slow adjustment in the prices of nontradable goods and services. Our empirical analysis uses data from five large devaluation episodes: Argentina (2002), Brazil (1999), Korea (1997), Mexico (1994), and Thailand (1997). We conduct a detailed analysis of the Argentinian case using disaggregated consumer price index data, data from our own survey of prices in Buenos Aires, and scanner data from supermarkets. We assess the robustness of our findings by studying large real exchange rate appreciations, medium devaluations, and small exchange rate movements. (Contains 28 notes.)

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to describe the salience of economic theories and evidence regarding vertical integration in the multichannel audiovisual industry in Brazil. This is especially important at this time because Brazilian regulators and legisla tors are wrestling with the appropriate policy approach toward the industry in Brazil in the wake of the merger of AT&T and Time Warner. Methodology/approach/design - The paper develops with several approaches. First, to develop context, the paper provides a high-level introduction to the evolution of the audiovisual industry. Second, the paper turns to a more specific assessment of the economic and legal lessons learned from the discussion and debate regarding the AT&T-Time Warner merger in the United States. This discussion draws on economic and legal theory and evidence, both from the published literature as well as from court proceedings to advance understanding of the issues. These foundational sections, in turn, provide a platform for policy insights. In particular, the paper builds upon earlier research on "resultsbased regulation" to provide guidance for Brazilian regulatory and legislative measures being considered in Brazil. Findings - The paper concludes that a results-based approach should permit advances in the vertical integration of the audiovisual industry in Brazil. Such an approach necessarily would recognize that the modern evolution towards a more vertically integrated provisioning of audiovisual services is providing numerous consumer benefits while claims of consumer harm have been judged to be speculative. Application of Article 5 of SeAC to the AT&T-TW merger provides no additional consumer protections that are not already part of the merger and would, instead be distinctly anti-consumer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the consequences of the hugely successful expansion of South-South Cooperation since the new millennium. For all the achievements, variations and change over the 1950s-late 1990s, 'SSC 1.0' was characterised by relative neglect within the 'international' development community, and by many orthodox and critical scholars. In the chronological schema of the paper, 'SSC 2.0' refers to the period of remarkable expansion from the early 2000s to the present. The emergence of 'SSC 3.0', I suggest, is currently revealed by a discernible set of shifts driven in large part by the expansionary successes of SSC 2.0, as well as other turns in the global political economy. Three contemporary trends are identified: cooperation narratives that are increasingly 'muscular', nationalistic and pragmatic; difficulties sustaining claims to 'non-interference' in partner countries; and the further erosion of ideational and operational distinctiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - New hepatitis C medicines such as sofosbuvir underline the need to balance considerations of innovation, clinical evidence, budget impact and equity in health priority-setting. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of public participation in addressing these considerations. Design/methodology/approach - The paper employs a comparative case study approach. It explores the experience of four countries - Brazil, England, South Korea and the USA - in making coverage decisions about the antiviral sofosbuvir and involving the public and patients in these decision-making processes. Findings - Issues emerging from public participation ac tivities include the role of the universal right to health in Brazil, the balance between innovation and budget impact in England, the effect of unethical medical practices on public perception in South Korea and the legitimacy of priority-setting processes in the USA. Providing policymakers are receptive to these issues, public participation activities may be re-conceptualized as processes that illuminate policy problems relevant to a particular context, thereby promoting an agenda-setting role for the public. Originality/value - The paper offers an empirical analysis of public involvement in the case of sofosbuvir, where the relevant considerations that bear on priority-setting decisions have been particularly stark. The perspectives that emerge suggest that public participation contributes to raising attention to issues that need to be addressed by policymakers. Public participation activities can thus contribute to setting policy agendas, even if that is not their explicit purpose. However, the actualization of this contribution is contingent on the receptiveness of policymakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper models the optimal debt management strategy of the public sector when issuing nominal, price-level-indexed and foreign denominated debt securities. The model predicts that the variance of inflation, the size of the public debt, the variance of the real exchange rate, and the correlation of inflation with public expenditures are the main determinants of public debt management. Using this framework the paper analyses the Brazilian experience with indexed debt in the last decade. In particular, it explains the large increase of indexed public debt in Brazil prior to the 1994 Real plan and, thereafter, the steady decline in its use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The automotive industry has been at the forefront of the globalisation process as a result of increasing global design and manufacturing. This has imposed a heavy burden on local auto parts producers. To enable a better understanding of this problem, this paper proposes a model to measure the degree of competitiveness for auto parts manufacturing companies. The study starts by analysing the current competitive forces governing the relationship among automotive assemblers and their first-tier suppliers and proposes a model that establishes (a) a competitive standard and (b) a measure called the degree of competitiveness, to be used to evaluate how similar (or dissimilar) a given company is compared with the aforesaid standard. The proposed conceptual model was tested in real-life situations by applying it to three Brazilian auto parts manufacturers with well-known competitive positions. The model was able to reproduce the same competitive position as those perceived by the market. The model and findings cannot be generalised for other industrial segments without some review and adaptation of the competitive factors considered. If required, a different set of competitive factors could be selected while maintaining all other aspects of the model as proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Capital accumulation is the first and foremost important factor to induce economic growth and development in a country. Yet, not every country in the world is bestowed with abundant capital. Thus, in this instance foreign direct investment (FDI) emerges as a good option to supply the necessary amount of capital to countries which are deprived of the necessary capital stock. Moreover, FDI, besides being a catalyst of economic development, is a significant means of transferring technology, knowledge, managerial know-how and constitutes new potentials to create employment opportunities, increase the production volume and enhance the foreign trade balance. Furthermore, the impact of FDI inflow on the economic growth is researched in this paper for Brazil by means of utilizing various econometric methods for the period of 1970–2017. According to the results of this study there is no positive causality between economic growth and FDI inflow in the short-run. Yet, there is a positive and significant causality between FDI inflow and economic growth in the long-run as well as this stems from the fact that investments lead to positive results gradually in the long-term which also means that investments shall be converted into production as much as possible. Moreover, the novelty of this paper is that it is one of the most up-to-date studies to research FDI – economic growth correlation on Brazil in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper empirically models the dynamics of Brazilian government bond (BGB) yields based on monthly macroeconomic data, in the context of the evolution of the key macroeconomic variables in Brazil. The results show that the current short-term interest rate has a decisive influence on the long-term interest rate on BGBs, after controlling for various key macroeconomic variables, such as inflation and industrial production. These findings support John Maynard Keynes's claim that the central bank's actions influence the long-term interest rate on government bonds mainly through the current short-term interest rate. These findings have important policy implications for Brazil. This paper relates the findings of the estimated models to ongoing debates in fiscal and monetary policies., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Reconciling conservation with rural development often constitutes a socio-environmental dilemma, in which ecotourism plays the part of either the panacea or the ‘poverty trap’ for local populations. Features of the local context, such as social heterogeneity, opportunities for education and jobs, and images of rural and urban life, provide a more nuanced understanding of this polarised debate. In this analysis of a youth ecotourism project, we consider that youth face distinct daily struggles and have aspirations in life that differ from those of the older generation. Therefore, the opportunities/constraints in and around protected areas influence and affect them in particular ways. In this paper, we address the gap in the literature on the position of young people living in peri-urban areas nearby conservation units, as we believe that these factors may shed some lights on the importance of intangible outcomes of sustainable development/conservation projects. Based on data from the peri-urban ‘forest town’ Curuçá on the Amazonian Atlantic coast of Brazil, we discuss how young people, involved in an ecotourism project in the Marine Extractive Reserve Mãe Grande de Curuçá, perceive their roles when it comes to conservation and development, education, jobs and their aspirations for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the dissemination of German economist Adolph Wagner's ideas in Brazil. It shows that his monetary thinking, inspired by Thomas Tooke and the Banking School, as well as his ideas on public finance, particularly the law of increasing state spending, were assimilated by two Brazilian economic thinkers: Rui Barbosa and Vieira Souto. The way these policymakers incorporated Wagner's ideas into their texts and the arguments with which they chose to engage show the kind of economic discourse they were shaping in Brazil. This analysis reveals the different functions that the original ideas could perform in another national context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Innovation: The European Journal of Social Sciences is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Research on the association between religion and health often neglects to provide an explicit theoretical mechanism of influence between faith and well-being. This research posits that dissociative behaviors, such as glossolalia, may provide a biological pathway that influences both physiological and psychological health. This paper argues that religious dissociation acts as a moderator between economic stressors and psychobiological appraisal. Brazil, with its economic inequality and preponderance of religious dissociative rituals, provides an ideal context to examine religious dissociation as a moderator of stress. Utilizing data from a cross section of Brazilian faiths, this paper examines: (1) Whether individuals with low socioeconomic status preferentially participate and experience religious dissociative states and (2) whether dissociative states are correlated with greater psychological appraisal of status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Dados - Revista de Ciências Sociais is the property of DADOS and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article presents abstracts of several papers published in the February 1965 issue of the journal Bulletin of Economics and Statistics. In the paper Notes on Public Investment Criteria in the United Kingdom, P. D. Henderson discussed the problem of devising a reasonable set of criteria for appraising public investment projects in Great Britain. While in the article The Absorption of Manpower by the Urban and Rural sectors of Brazil, Raouf Kahil examined the available data concerning urban and rural populations in Brazil and argues that the basis of a valid judgment of the job opportunities offered by the urban and rural sectors were cannot be seen.

This paper analyses the agrarian policies of the governments of Presidents Lula (2003-2010) and Dilma Rousseff (2011-2016) in the light of the contradiction between the historical support for land reform and agrarian social movements by the Workers' Party (PT) on the one hand, and the PT's more recent electoral and political alliances with agribusiness on the other. After more than a decade of progressive administrations, key government programmes have only accounted for marginal gains and in some cases setbacks, symbolized by the failure to expand the expropriation of new land and settle landless families on an adequate scale. The collapse of those alliances and 2016's impeachment process of President Rousseff marks the end of that cycle, highlighting strategic and policy failures. The paper examines government actions, the historical causes and roots of land conflicts, and struggles for land and territory, as well as the difficulties of mobilization. The paper focuses upon political disputes, particularly new processes of criminalization, economic disputes, surrounding the role of agribusiness, and the challenges related to struggles for land and territorial rights in a situation ruled by a progressive party and governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the impact of climate change on agricultural productivity. Cross-sectional variation in climate among Brazilian municipalities is used to estimate an equation in which geographical attributes determine agricultural productivity. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predictions based on atmosphere–ocean, coupled with general circulation models (for 2030–2049), are used to simulate the impacts of climate change. Our estimates suggest that global warming under the current technological standards is expected to decrease the agricultural output per hectare in Brazil by 18 per cent, with the effects on municipalities ranging from−40 to+15 per cent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Regional Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper examines the relationship between public employment and income redistribution in Brazilian municipalities. First, we use the requirements set forth by the Fiscal Responsibility Act as an instrument for public employment variation across municipalities. Second, our results suggest that local public employment increases income concentration instead of fostering redistribution. This result puts into perspective the model provided in Alesina et al. (J. Urban Econ. 48:219-241, ) where public employment can be used as device for redistributing income in the United States. This seems to be an outcome of the current public employment structure and not an explicit public policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically investigates the lack of meaningful policy change towards agrofuels (or biofuels) in the wake of the food vs. fuel and environmental sustainability debates of 2007-2008. The paper sketches the political economy of agrofuels in Brazil, the EU and the United States before analyzing the effects of the food vs. fuel crisis on European agrofuels governance formation from a neo-Gramscian perspective. It is illustrated that, before the food vs. fuel crisis provided critics with a global audience, agrofuels programs had been entrenched in agricultural policies by highly organized, well-funded capital interests. By offering a domestic, rural, agricultural alternative to fossil fuels, agrofuel proponents offered to make a business opportunity out of the fundamental problems of currently hegemonic, mobility, production and consumption systems. It was only with dramatic rise in food commodity prices over the course of 2007 and 2008 and subsequent space it discursively afforded a counter-hegemonic movement, that a truly global critical discussion of agrofuels came to fruition. The author concludes that, despite rhetorical discursive shifts in understandings of the social and ecological sustainability of agrofuels, agrofuel production continues to be supported today as before because the agrofuels project was and remains a predominantly economically motivated endeavor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a measure of the contribution of unequal opportunities to earnings inequality. Drawing on the distinction between “circumstance” and “effort” variables in John Roemer's work on equality of opportunity, we associate inequality of opportunities with five observed circumstances which lie beyond the control of the individual—father's and mother's education; father's occupation; race; and region of birth. The paper provides a range of estimates of the importance of these opportunity-forming circumstances in accounting for earnings inequality in one of the world's most unequal countries. We also decompose the effect of opportunities into a direct effect on earnings and an indirect component, which works through the “effort” variables. The decomposition is applied to the distribution of male earnings in urban Brazil, in 1996. The five observed circumstances are found to account for between 10 and 37 percent of the Theil index, depending on cohort and allowing for the possibility of biased coefficient estimates due to unobserved correlates. On average, 60 percent of this impact operates through the direct effect on earnings. Parental education is the most important circumstance affecting earnings, but the occupation of the father and race also play a role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Environment & Urbanization is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

An important goal of regional development in the Brazilian Amazon was to enhance social welfare and alleviate dire poverty in other parts of the country by providing land to the poor. Nevertheless, both poverty and landlessness have persisted despite development policies that distributed billions of dollars on highway construction, loans, and outright subsidies. Inequitable land distribution has been held as a prime factor in land conflict across the country. Although episodes of conflict over land are common in Brazilian history, this paper focuses on agrarian issues that arose with the opening of the Amazon frontier in the 1970s. The paper presents a political economy approach that considers the role of hierarchical forces interacting across spatial scales, in creating conditions ripe for land conflict at the local level. The premise is that the Brazilian government, intending to bring about economic and social development, promoted contradictory strategies creating land scarcity. These strategies led to expansion of large ranching operations, creation of conservation units, and demarcation of indigenous reserves, which constrained the pool of land available for small farmer settlement. Empirical analysis employing regression and spatial statistics is used to test the proposed model, advancing previous efforts by applying spatial regression, incorporating improved indicators of conflict and explanatory variables generated by a Geographic Information System (GIS). The findings provide support for some elements of the argument, demonstrating statistically significant relationships between land conflict and land concentration, cattle ranching, and road construction. Finally, a case study analysis of a county in the heart of the land conflict zone is provided, illustrating the interaction of scalar forces, and the articulation of land conflict at the local level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper estimates firm specific indexes of technical efficiency for the Brazilian plastics and steel industries. Two different indexes are employed for the empirical estimates—the Farrell index and an index developed from a linear programming approximation of a nonstochastic frontier production function specified in the Cobb-Douglas functional form. Evidence of substantial relative technical inefficiency is revealed. In both industries only a very small proportion of all the observed firms were producing amounts of output greater than 80 percent of that technically possible on the estimated frontier. Relative efficiency of the firms in the two industries was not seen to be significantly related to ownership (foreign or government), but tests did suggest a tendency for larger firms, possessing larger market shares, to be closer to the frontier than smaller firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Primary health care has been recognized as a critical strategy for improving population health in developing countries. This paper investigates the effect of primary care physicians on the infant mortality rate in Brazil using a dynamic panel data approach. This method accounts for the endogeneity problem and the persistence of infant mortality over time. The empirical analysis uses an eight-year panel of municipalities between 2005 and 2012. The results indicate that primary care physician supply contributed to the decline of infant mortality in Brazil. An increase of one primary care physician per 10,000 population was associated with 7.08 fewer infant deaths per 10,000 live births. This suggests that, in addition to other determinants, primary care physicians can play an important role in accounting for the reduction of infant mortality rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research focuses on a mining frontier in the municipality of Canaã dos Carajás, located in the Brazilian Eastern Amazon. The method involved a combination of secondary data with field research. The latter is based on in-person interviews with a sample of 253 households. The paper analyzes the municipality and its inhabitant's socioeconomic situation and captures the views of residents about life in the town. The results showed that mining played an important role in increase of Canaã's income and exports, despite the late 2000s economic crises. Consequently, many socioeconomic indicators improved in Canaã. However, inequality increase and employment fall associated with S11D operation pose challenges to the municipality—currently and possibly in the future. Canaã expects high amounts of royalties of iron ore exploitation. These royalties can help the municipality's economy if the planning and political-institutional contexts are adequate. Field work dataset showed that Canaã's population is essentially migrant who arrived after 2004 seeking work and income opportunities, as an effect of mining growth. Nevertheless, people became more skeptical as a consequence of S11D operation and jobs loss, many businesses closure and drastic reduction of movement in the city. The results show the challenge to convert the increasing income from different stages of mining activity into permanently better and broader public services. This result is especially important in the studied case of a recent town located in the southeast Amazonia, whose dynamics are strongly linked to mining economics, and faces effects of changes in stages of large-scale mining projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Synthetic natural gas (SNG) derived from biomass gasification is a potential transport fuel and natural gas substitute. Using the Netherlands as a case study, this paper evaluates the most economic and environmentally optimal supply chain for the production of biomass based SNG (so‐called bio‐SNG) for different biomass production regions and location of final conversion facilities, with final delivery of compressed natural gas at refueling stations servicing the transport sector. At a scale of 100 MWth, in, delivered bioSNG costs range from 18.6 to 25.9$/GJdelivered CNG while energy efficiency ranges from 46.8–61.9%. If production capacities are scaled up to 1000 MWth, in, SNG costs decrease by about 30% to 12.6–17.4$ GJdelivered CNG−1. BioSNG production in Ukraine and transportation of the gas by pipeline to the Netherlands results in the lowest delivered cost in all cases and the highest energy efficiency pathway (61.9%). This is mainly due to low pipeline transport costs and energy losses compared to long‐distance Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) transport. However, synthetic natural gas production from torrefied pellets (TOPs) results in the lowest GHG emissions (17 kg CO2e GJCNG−1) while the Ukraine routes results in 25 kg CO2e GJCNG−1. Production costs at 100 MWth are higher than the current natural gas price range, but lower than the oil prices and biodiesel prices. BioSNG costs could converge with natural gas market prices in the coming decades, estimated to be 18.2$ GJ−1. At 1000 MWth, bioSNG becomes competitive with natural gas (especially if attractive CO2 prices are considered) and very competitive with oil and biodiesel. It is clear that scaling of SNG production to the GWth scale is key to cost reduction and could result in competitive SNG costs. For regions like Brazil, it is more cost‐effective to densify biomass into pellets or TOPS and undertake final conversion near the import harbor. © 2018 Society of Chemical Industry and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The losses caused by worker theft is one of the most concerning security problems for corporations. Private policing of the workplace is central to cutting down on such losses and keeping up profits. One of the most frequently used methods in such policing is searching workers. Despite the importance of searches and their potential for intrusion into individuals' right to privacy, the normative bases for and limits to the use of this power have so far been little studied. The aim of this paper is to analyze the legal foundations and limits imposed by the Brazilian State so that private security guards can conduct searches in the workplace. The analysis is based on a qualitative study of Brazilian labor law and a qualitative/quantitative study of 376 judicial decisions on searches collected randomly in two Brazilian states between 2010 and 2013. The data shows that searches can be conducted in the workplace based on the employer's right to manage production and protect their property. It also indicates the existence of relatively flexible limits to searches. Only a minority of the courts impose restrictions on searches similar to those set for police officers. Most judges allow more extensive searches than those permitted within the scope of public justice systems. The consequences of these findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last years, the new science of cities has been established as a fertile quantitative approach to systematically understand the urban phenomena. One of its main pillars is the proposition that urban systems display universal scaling behavior regarding socioeconomic, infrastructural and individual basic services variables. This paper discusses the extension of the universality proposition by testing it against a broad range of urban metrics in a developing country urban system. We present an exploration of the scaling exponents for over 60 variables for the Brazilian urban system. Estimating those exponents is challenging from the technical point of view because the Brazilian municipalities’ definition follows local political criteria and does not regard characteristics of the landscape, density, and basic utilities. As Brazilian municipalities can deviate significantly from urban settlements, urban-like municipalities were selected based on a systematic density cut-off procedure and the scaling exponents were estimated for this new subset of municipalities. To validate our findings we compared the results for overlaying variables with other studies based on alternative methods. It was found that the analyzed socioeconomic variables follow a superlinear scaling relationship with the population size, and most of the infrastructure and individual basic services variables follow expected sublinear and linear scaling, respectively. However, some infrastructural and individual basic services variables deviated from their expected regimes, challenging the universality hypothesis of urban scaling. We propose that these deviations are a product of top-down decisions/policies. Our analysis spreads over a time-range of 10 years, what is not enough to draw conclusive observations, nevertheless we found hints that the scaling exponent of these variables are evolving towards the expected scaling regime, indicating that the deviations might be temporally constrained and that the urban systems might eventually reach the expected scaling regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trade between South American States and China is an important source of the economic growth for those economies in the 2000s. A rather sharp growth in China’s presence in world trade since the beginning of the 2000s changed world trade trends for MERCOSUR countries. The aim of this paper is to analyze the effects of recent growing Chinese trade on South American economic development, mainly in the cases of Argentina and Brazil. In particular, the impact of an increasing trade of agrifood has been quite relevant. On the other hand, each country’s national strategy is another important issue, particularly bilateral relations with China, which is also revisited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article intends to contribute to the line of studies that critically addresses diversity management, bringing the Brazilian experience into the discussion. It aims to demonstrate how large Brazilian companies and transnational corporations operating in the country have been recycling the idea of race in order to cope with the greatest politicisation of debates on the racial issue within the Brazilian public sphere since the late twentieth century. This phenomenon is related to changes in the political actions of the black movement in Brazil, which since the same period has been absorbing the new socio-political agenda existing within the global network of anti-racism advocacy. This is an agenda in which two purposes have a central importance: the battle against racial inequality and the demand for affirmative action policies. The data presented in this paper are part of broader research in which, by means of the biographical method and the ethnographic fieldwork, the social trajectories and career paths of two generations of Brazilian black executives were analysed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]