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The paper's main goal is to advance in the knowledge of a key function of the government: the policy coordination. This is even more relevant within the core of the government, which is a set of institutions and actors that provide direct support to implementation of priority actions defined by the president. Thus, the research analyzes what mechanisms, instruments and levels of coordination are actually used in the policymaking of four strategic policies during the Lula's and Dilma's administration, namely: i) Programa Bolsa Família (PBF); ii) Programa de Aceleração do Crescimento (PAC); iii) Programa Brasil Sem Miséria (BSM); e iv) Programa de Investimento em Logística (PIL). The investigation employed bibliographic review, content analysis of official publications and, mainly, interviews with actors who occupied key positions in the Presidency and Ministries of Finance and Planning in both administrations. The main conclusion is that in spite of the existence of various formal and procedural coordination instruments, in practice, the instruments most used in priority policies coordination are the ones informal and designed ad hoc for such programs. In addition, the hierarchical mechanism shares space with intra-governmental networking strategies, especially to solve conflicts and disagreements among ministries.

The objective of this text is to present an overview of the trajectory of the infrastructure policies in Brazil in the recent period (2005-2013). In order to do so, it highlights the main efforts and advances towards the resumption of the role of the federal government in the sector, as well as it points to the limits and obstacles that contributed to the production of incomplete results and partial achievements in terms of project implementation and effectiveness. The analysis of the historical trajectory draws from three interrelated analytical categories: political-institutional environment, institutional arrangements and instruments of public action. The main conclusion is that the advances in the development of instruments and arrangements were incomplete and insufficient. Incomplete because they failed to overcome some of internal limitations (such as planning failures and decision-making processes isolated from civil society). Insufficient because, even if they were fully developed, they would still face difficulties in counterbalancing external constraints and the governance challenges imposed by the Brazilian political-institutional environment (such as a fragmentation of the state apparatus and the short-term interests of political actors inside the logic of the political system).

This text discusses the regulatory frameworks of public transport systems for urban bus, featuring their main variables and assessing their impact on economic, financial and operational services. Initially, it tried to clarify the reasons for the regulation of urban bus systems from a review of the literature, emphasizing among other things the existing market failures, such as the generation of negative externalities and socialinequalities in the production of services in addition to own essentiality of public transport - responsible for the low-income population displacements. In addition, it was presented a set of descriptive variables of regulatory frameworks, as a platform for exploratory and comparative analysis of these models.

The transport economics literature has indicated that introduction of competition for the market in urban bus services (i.e. by means of competitive bidding) could promote cost-efficiency with low fares and better quality services. Therefore, this paper analyse the main outcomes and the latest consequences of the bidding process occurred during 1997-1998 in Belo Horizonte with the use of operational data. Did economic efficiency improve? Did fares decrease? This case study concludes that contracting-out bus services through a bidding process is not enough to ensure company cost-efficiency if public authorities do not implement a well-devised competitive tendering process and do not design an effective regulatory framework. We hope that this study can help policy makers to improve future bidding processes in Brazilian cities and to design an effective regulatory model for the urban bus sector, especially in these days where the media have made known the critical situation endured by the urban poor, which have no conditions to afford the costly fare levels of the public transport services.