This article analyses the roots of the European debt crisis, which started at the end of 2009 and embraced the so called PIGS, causing a global turbulence. It studies the historical genesis of the European Monetary Union since the decade of 1970, in connection with the dynamics of the...

This article shows that, to a large extent, the European sovereign debt crisis resulted from the institutional arrangement of Maastricht, as well as the policies pursued by the European leadership, formatted from the "new macroeconomic consensus" and the theory of optimal economic area. In...

The aim of this paper is to analyze critically the Independence of Central Banks (ICB). By presenting the theoretical arguments that support the independence, as well as some empirical studies regarding this topic, we introduce the main critical concerns about the argument of ICB. Besides, we...

Despite the fact that after the second half of the 1990s studies of financial exclusion have gained strength among the studies about poverty and regional and social inequalities, a few studies about this problem had appear in the Brazilian economic literature. The present work contributes to the...

Several institutional changes in the last 20 years have imposed to the public administrators the adoption of several policies intended to qualify the State for the new economic order. The expenditure control has turned to be central in the political economy. Regarding the Brazilian states, a...

This article challenges the notion that the modern general equilibrium theory of Arrow-Debreu is a rigorous formulation of neoclassical economics and that, by contrast, Sraffian and Marxian economics are not compatible with it. It shows that the standard Arrow-Debreu assumptions regarding the...

The aim of this paper is to discuss the idea that knowledge externalities, as discussed in the Endogenous Growth Theory, can be spread over any kind of space. Although this point has already been discussed by some scholars in the heterodox tradition (Nelson, 1998, Martin and Sunley, 1998, among...

One important question that has been discussed in the literature about regional economics is the relevance of local productive networks (clusters) for the regional development. It is possible to find a huge number of case studies that discuss many aspects of this kind of network: cooperation,...

This article aims at exploring the empirical evidence regarding the effects of increasing returns to scale and international technological diffusion on the Brazilian manufacturing industry. Our departure point is a Kaldorian-type theoretical model that provides not only the positive effects of...

There are in the literature on both industrial and regional economics many studies on local productive arrangements. Indeed, this kind of industrial/regional organization has become an important piece in the implementation of industrial, regional and technological policies. Accordingly, a...