伊利诺伊大学香槟分校商学院选聘董事的政治视角

无论是政党领导还是普通市民，拉丁美洲的左翼人士通常认为外国投资者和右翼政客是一伙的。这就为欲进入拉美市场的外国公司带来了麻烦，因为左翼政府不信任这些公司，并会严格限制这些公司的活动。请关注西班牙的跨国公司近年来在智利市场所取得的成功，他们知道怎样把左翼政治家的情绪转化为自己的优势。     

The service sector of Cuba: An analysis and critique

The Cuban economy has experienced a significant increase in foreign direct investment over the past decade due to the end of the Soviet Union and the establishment of more liberal trade policies. Although the U.S. embargo of trade with Cuba still exists, there has been movement lately that suggests the end of the four‐decades‐old policy. The purpose of this article is to analyze the current Cuban business environment and to identify potential entrepreneurial opportunities in the service sector. Major trade partners are also reviewed and managerial implications discussed. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Pro-poor trade policy in Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper examines the presence of a pro-poor bias in the existing structure of protection of six Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Ethiopia, Gambia, and Madagascar. We build on a simple agricultural household production model and we propose an extension to include adjustments in labor income. Our approach, which can be implemented without repeated cross-sections of household level data, suits well the data constraints in SSA. It also allows us to capture the heterogeneity in trade protection at the tariff line level. The pro-poor bias indicators suggest that SSA's trade policies tend to be biased in favor of poor households, as these policies redistribute income from rich to poor households. This is because protection increases the agricultural prices of goods that are sold by African households and this effect dominates both the impacts of higher consumption prices and the strong Stolper–Samuelson effects that benefit skilled over unskilled workers.     

Jorma Ahvenainen. The European Cable Companies in South America before the First World War. Helsinki, Finland: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2004. 427 pp. ISBN 951-41-0947-3, X35.00.

After the wars of independence in the first half of the nineteenthcentury, Latin American countries embarked on a process of insertioninto the world economy, opening their doors to foreign investmentand specializing in the exportation of raw materials. In freemarkets and in an alignment with the British imperial economicsystem, Latin American elites saw a road for economic prosperityand political stability. Between the 1880s and 1914, Latin Americabecame more integrated into the     

Estimating the social cost of pesticide use: An assessment from acute poisoning in Brazil

The intensive use of pesticides in countries like Brazil has ignored structural and institutional shortfalls, such as the lack of workforce training for the new, difficult to implement technologies, and the institutional vulnerability of the environmental protection, health, and safety sectors. As a result we have “invisible” or social, environmental and health costs which end up being socialised with the farmer, in general, having no incentives to recognise and internalise them. This study is intended to review and develop this problem in the light of the Brazilian reality. To this end, we make use of an empirical exercise to illustrate estimation of the social cost associated with acute poisoning by pesticide using the PREVS/IBGE data (Harvest Forecast Research) in the state of Paraná, Brazil. The results suggest that, for maize, the costs of acute poisoning could represent 64% of the benefits of using herbicides and insecticides, and, in the best of hypotheses, when some risk factors are eliminated, they may reach 8% of the benefits of the use of these products. Similarly, when we examine future scenarios for five and ten years, we find less encouraging results, as in ten years the costs of acute poisoning could reach around 85% of the benefit of using insecticides and herbicides for maize. However, there is the encouraging news that, if preventive measures were taken during this time, the gains would be considerable, about 6.5 times greater. We conclude that an assessment of the real benefits involved with pesticides in Brazil is required, principally in regard to the smallholder, where farmers need more training in the use — or even the elimination — of these hazardous substances. There are sustainable technological options available which are economically efficient, especially if we consider the social, environmental and health costs. In this context it is worth highlighting the role of regulatory measures as a mechanism which can reorient generation of negative external costs through the reduction of current incentives in the socialisation of private costs.     

Trademark Protection or Protectionism?*

This paper explores the extent to which discrimination against foreign applicants in the trademark registration process can be used as a “behind‐the‐border” barrier to imports. Prima‐facie evidence shows that in some developing countries the ratio of trademark registrations to applications is much higher for national than for foreign applicants, which is consistent with the notion of discrimination against foreign firms. A simple model is developed that suggests that incentives to discriminate are stronger when foreign firms manufacture products that are close in quality to the goods produced by domestic firms. This hypothesis is then tested and empirically confirmed in three of the four countries in our sample, suggesting that discretion and discrimination in the trademark registration process can sometimes be used as a protectionist tool.     

FIRING COSTS AND BUSINESS CYCLE FLUCTUATIONS*

This article considers a real business cycle model with establishment level dynamics and uses it to analyze the effects of firing taxes. It finds that firing taxes can have significant consequences on business cycle fluctuations, that the largest effects are on aggregate employment, and that even relatively small firing taxes have substantial effects. A significant contribution of the article is computational: It describes how to use standard linear‐quadratic methods to solve for a stochastic equilibrium of an (S,s) economy with tax distortions.     

Determinants of hierarchical structure in industrial firms: an empirical study

The paper investigates implications of different theoretical models for hierarchical structure. A sample of 6,578 firms in the Brazilian manufacturing industry is considered and explanatory factors pertaining to structural characteristics, network technology, technological innovations, managerial innovations and incentive mechanisms are investigated. Important joint effects are detected for all groups of variables in partial contrast with the related previous literature. Moreover, one detects significant joint effect of the newly considered group of incentive variables. The evidence in terms of individual effects is largely consistent with the predicted effects from the theoretical literature.     

Endogenous Tariff Formation: The Case of Mercosur

Mercosur appears as an interesting case study for analyzingthe determinants of exceptions in regional trade agreements.Its member countries—Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, andUruguay—intended to make Mercosur a full customs unionby January 1995. This goal turned out to be too ambitious, andthe Protocol of Ouro Preto and other agreements signed in December1994 led to a hybrid solution. Overall, out of a total of 9,119tariff lines, around 30 percent are subject, in at least onemember country, to either external deviations from the commonexternal tariff or internal deviations from free trade. Thusan important set of holes remains under the existing agreement,leading some authors to consider Mercosur an incomplete customsunion. This article compares the results of the theoretical literatureon endogenous tariff formation with evidence from Mercosur.The results show that Mercosur's common external tariff andmember countries' deviations from it and from internal freetrade can be explained by sector or industry lobbying as predictedby the endogenous tariff literature. If a viable political economyis a key to success, then Mercosur is here to stay.     

Energy prices,substitution, and optimal borrowing in the short run: An analysis of adjustment in oil importing developing countries

The paper discusses optimal short-term borrowing in response to an increase in the price of imported inputs. The rationale for borrowing lies in the increase in substitution possibilities in production (between imported and domestic inputs) and in consumption (between traded and non-traded goods) as the economy adjusts its structure to the new prices. A typology of LDCs and the oil price increases in the 70's are used to illustrate the results of the model, which are compared with the actual increase in borrowing during the period.