Market share instability in Brazilian industry: a dynamic panel data analysis

The paper investigates market share instability in the context of Brazilian industry for the 1986–1998 period. The paper proposes the use of panel data unit root tests to access market share instability for a sample of industrial firms from different sectors and therefore generalizes related time series unit root tests proposed by Gallet and List (2001 Gallet, CA and List, JA. 2001. Market share instability: an application of unit root tests for the cigarette industry. Journal of Economics and Business, 53: 473–80.  ). The results mostly indicate that one cannot reject the hypothesis of market share instability and therefore there exist some degree of market rivalry in the Brazilian case.     

Evaluation of Collaborative Strategies Used in the Management of Natural Parks in Rio de Janeiro

This paper presents the main conclusions of exploratory research aimed at analyzing the management of eight natural parks in the city of Rio de Janeiro. In view of the participative management guidelines proposed by Law 9985 (“NSCU”), the findings revealed that governmental agencies have, indeed, been making an effort to establish more participative management by means of advisory councils. Despite this, the initiatives have still been partially ineffective. The multiple case studies show that different forms of partnership are sustained with varied organizations; however, factors such as bureaucracy, lack of management autonomy, and the inadequate use of managing tools have hampered the expansion of such collaborative strategies.     

Business cycle convergence and trade: Brazil and China in a changing world

The recent economic interaction between Latin America and Asia, particularly between Brazil and China, has attracted the attention of the academic world that seeks to understand the effects of this approach in terms of business cycle convergence, economic structure and development trajectory. This paper contributes to this debate, presenting new evidence about the type and quality of this relationship. Our results reveal that Brazil and China present different patterns of relationship between trade and productive specialization: while Brazil has an intra-industry trade pattern, China has an inter-industry trade pattern. We explore some normative implications and future research possibilities.     

Back to Little Havana: Controlling Gentrification in the Heart of Cuban Miami

In this article we examine the nature and implementation of governing strategies to control the gentrification of Little Havana, the symbolic heart of Cuban Miami. We ask how Cuban American power relations at the neighborhood level operate to ‘produce’ the citizen best suited to fulfill and help reproduce policies and practices of ‘securing’ in order to gentrify Little Havana. Based on long‐term ethnographic research in Little Havana and Miami, our analysis reveals how governance operates through neighborhood‐level intermediaries and interpersonal relations. We apply Foucault's ‘pastoral power’ to Miami's Cuban exile community in order to explain how the ‘Cuban‐ness’ and ‘Latin‐ness’ of governing relations and the personification of political power are crucial to socio‐spatial control in Little Havana. Elites shape the conduct of individuals in order to achieve strategic goals in the name of community interest. Residents are key partners in the relational ensemble that governs and disciplines the neighborhood comprised mostly of low‐income, Central‐American immigrants.     

Analysing the profitability of the Spanish fleet after the anchovy moratorium using bootstrap techniques

Given the low biomass level of the anchovy, the European Commission agreed to establish a moratorium on this species in the Bay of Biscay in 2005. Although the effects of managing the fishing activity with TACs, fees, taxes and ITQs on the stocks and future net profits are well documented in the specialized literature, scarce attention has been paid to analyze the effects of moratoriums on fisheries and the profitability of the fleet. This paper studies if the anchovy moratorium had a significant impact on the economic profitability of the fleet that fishes anchovy and other pelagic species in the North Atlantic waters. For this purpose, we compare the financial situations of the fleet before and after the moratorium from a statistical point of view using bootstrap, which is a flexible non-parametric and computationally intensive methodology. The results reveal the existence of a structural change in the financial performance of the fleet after the implementation of the moratorium.     

Provided and perceived status quo in choice experiments: Implications for valuing the outputs of multifunctional rural areas

This article presents a choice experiment analyzing multifunctional rural development policies targeting conservation and recovery of environmental, social and cultural assets. In choice experiments a base alternative is usually included in order to estimate the welfare change associated to policy proposals. This study is concerned with the much neglected issue of the impact on policy analysis of the definition of a ‘status quo’ alternative either as an objective assessment by experts, or as a self-reported perception by respondents. Convergent validity analysis and prospective policy scenarios show a significant impact of different status quo specifications on individuals' preferences and related welfare measures when complex and unfamiliar biophysical systems are involved in policy analysis and evaluation.     

Expectancy balance model for cash flow

Economic agents try to find out the composition of different forms of assets, and the amount of each, that maximizes total wealth. The money demanded by firms is a function of the benefits and costs of holding it considering other forms of assets. The money held in cash can be remunerated by some earning asset. Even when the money is invested in bank funds or bonds, the interest rate is usually lower than the return that the firm’s business may yield. When the firm keeps idle money in cash, the firm renounces to part of its profitability, incurring in the opportunity cost of not investing in alternatives, named Holding Cost. If the firm gives preference to other assets over cash, the balance level may be insufficient for its disbursement needs. The Shortage Cost is the price of obtaining money by other means. The Expectancy Balance Model (EBM) proposed minimizes the Total Cost (combined Holding and Shortage Costs) of maintaining and transforming money from or into other forms of assets. The EBM is an instrument of cash flow decision that deals with the demand for money by firms employing the maximizing utility of total wealth (set of assets) rule.     

Profit margins and business cycles in the Brazilian industry: a panel data study

The paper investigates the relationship between profit margins and business cycle in the Brazilian industry during the 1992–1998 period, taking as reference a dynamic panel data model founded around a conjectural variation framework. The empirical results indicate procyclical behaviour of profit margins for the aggregate business cycle but is less clear in the case of sector-specific business cycle variables. Among the most robust results, one can highlight the roles of lagged profitability and import intensity and the negligible role of union density. Schmalensee in (American Economic Review 75, pp. 341–51) outlined three theoretical interpretations associated with the empirical model (classical, revisionist and managerial). Econometric tests on the related restrictions do not allow one to exclusively legitimate any of the three interpretations.     

Common Context for Decisions and their Implementations

Decisions are frequently sent to implementers without the context that guided them. It should not be a surprise, then, that results are not as expected. The lack of supplementary information and a common context produces wrongly implemented or lost decisions. This paper proposes a solution to this problem based on groupware technology. In particular, a combination of tools including shared workspaces, process modeling with workflow and a discussion tool, is proposed. A case is used to illustrate the problem and its solution.