In different continents there is a paradigm of a vicious circle of poverty and natural resource degradation. However, there are cases where this may not be true. Thus, the central objective of this study was to analyze the relationship between rural poverty and soil degradation in land reform...

Several authors have detected a paradigm shift in contemporary science: from a reductionist or mechanicist approach to a holistic or systemic one. This transition in paradigms should be perceptible in several disciplines, starting in biology and extending itself to others areas. In light of the...

This paper investigates how the finances of the Brazilian federal government responded to innovations in the debts of the most indebted states, São Paulo, Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro and Rio Grande do Sul. Using monthly data from 1981 to 1998, a vector autoregression system (VAR) is estimated...

This article explores why Smith's work is a turning point in the history of economic thought. The constitution of an economic discourse and the delimitation of the economy sphere are attributed to: i) the specific nature of Smith's moral philosophy; ii) his way of conceiving economic action as...

This article discusses the institutional mechanisms which characterized the degree of the independence of the Brazilian Central Bank since its creation in 1964 until the implementation of the Real Plan in 1994. The relationship between the Brazilian Treasury and the Central Bank is analyzed from...

The objective of this paper is to attempt to make a contribution by discussing the application of different testing procedures and techniques used in determining the seasonal properties of quarterly data. The data used in this example are the quarterly prices of beef cattle in the Liniers market...

One important piece of the modern neo-classical theory of international trade is the celebrated Factor Price Equalization Theorem, developed independently by Lerner (1952, though written in 1932) and Samuelson (1948, 1949, 1953). This Theorem states that under certain conditions free trade leads...

This paper investigates the sustainability of the Brazilian federal domestic debt using quarterly data from 1981 to 1998. A debt is considered sustainable if the government's budget is intertemporally balanced. Sustainability is tested through the mean-zero stationarity of the discounted...

This paper investigates the emergence in the Modernity of an economic discourse intended to be autonomous from moral and political philosophy. The article demonstrates that the existence of economics as separated field of knowledge is recent and its creation related to the appearance of market...

This note discusses the concept of 'inflation adjusted nominal deficit' proposed by Robert Barro in light of a stock-flow consistent real deficit. It is argued that the calculation proposed by the author violates the principle of stock-flow consistency and leads one to the erroneous...