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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 examines the stagnation of Brazilian exports of products other than coffee during the postwar period. Export stagnation led to a pattern of autarkic development. The combination of growing domestic demand and income-inelastic supply of imports put pressure on the real exchange rate. As the external value of the cruzeiro depreciated more rapidly than the internal inflation, relative prices moved to favor domestic producers for many new products, leading to the establishment of many new industries producing only for the internal market, and very rapid growth based on import substitution. This process was self-sustaining, as import substitution coupled with export stagnation in one period lowered the equilibrium exchange rate for imports, and stimulated further import substitution in the next. Because of the increasing inelasticity of domestic production with respect to downward movements of the exchange rate, however, import substitution became a progressively more expensive way both of saving foreign exchange and of generating growth.

This article examines the experience Brazil has had with indexing its economy, a policy that was undertaken in 1964 as a response to inflation. Brazilian indexing or monetary correction was applied in some fashion to taxes, financial instruments, exchange rates, and wages. Monetary corrections in the first three nonwage areas succeeded in restoring to prices and the market place the allocative role they had lost during the preceding hyper-inflation years. Interest rates and exchange rates were made meaningful once again and some workable private financial instruments were created. But nonwage indexation has served as a vehicle for government intervention rather than as a substitute for it. Export subsidies and incentives have been used alongside the crawling peg; indexing as applied to mortgage loans has undergone extensive revision at various times; tax rulings concerning financial assets have been changed, providing favorable treatment to certain assets at the expense of others. It was stressed that wage indexing was more a form of price control than a step toward better functioning markets. Instead of serving as an automatic correction for inflation, wage indexing in practice was a completely discretionary instrument of policy.

The article presents international marketing abstracts. They include "Exporting Industrial Products via Commission Agents," by C. R. Russell, "Application of Systems Theory to Development Planning in Northeast Brazil," by Martin Stoller and Thomas Webb, and "They Take Millions Here."

This article is limited to the study of the structure of trade conducted between a semi-industrialized country and a group of countries possessing an advanced industrial base. To analyze the commodity composition of trade between a semi-industrialized country, like Brazil, that has a relatively small and unsophisticated manufacturing sector and the industrialized countries of Western Europe and North America, the neo-factor proportions theory is evoked. The factor proportions account views trade patterns as the outcome of the interaction between the production characteristics of commodities and the countries' relative availability of these factors.

Despite favorable natural resources, Brazil's economic growth has not kept pace with the needs of its expanding population. A partial explanation for this situation was sought in an examination of the prevalence of two psychosocial factors--achievement motivation and achievement values--among the people of Brazil. It was hypothesized that these psychosocial factors are less characteristic of the people of Brazil than of the United States and that their relative absence has been an adverse factor in Brazil's economic development. Data were obtained from subjects in Brazil and the United States by means of a Thematic Apperception Test, questionnaires, interviews and observation over an extended period. It was found that Brazilians had lower achievement motivation, were less activistic and future-oriented, placed less emphasis on planning and the postponement of gratifications, put a lower evaluation on work and were less willing to be physically mobile than their American counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]