Brazil, as the rest of Latin America, has experienced three cycles of capital inflows since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system. The first two ended in financial crises, and at the time of writing the third one is still unfolding, although already showing considerable signs of distress. The...

This paper examines the current global scene of within-nations distributional disparities. There are three main conclusions: first, that the statistical evidence for the ‘upwards’ side of the “Inverted-U” between inequality and income per capita seems to have vanished, as many lowand...

As soon as international financial markets felt reassured in 2003 by the surprisingly neoliberal orientation of President Lula’s government, the ‘spot-the-new-Latin-tiger’ financial brigade became dazzled by Brazil — they just couldn’t have enough of it. So much so, that they had...

Latin America’s economic performance since the beginning of neo-liberal reforms has been poor; this not only contrasts with its performance pre-1980, but also with what was happening simultaneously in Asia. I shall argue that the weakness of the region’s new paradigm is rooted as much in its...

How are state-owned entreprises to be reformed? Privatisation seems to be the obvious solution. This essay argues that entreprises reform in the transition should focus on enhancing managerial.

In the evolutionary setting for a financial market developed by Blume and Easley (1992) the author considers an infinitely repeated version of a model B la Grossman and Stiglitz (1980) with asymmetrically informed traders. Informed traders observe the realisation of a payoff relevant signal...

In this paper we examine the spatial and temporal distribution of per capita income across Europe. We base our analysis on a cluster methodology which allows for an endogenous selection of regional clusters using a multivariate test for stationarity where the number and composition of clusters...

In a representative democracy, voters can use elections to protect their property by holding politicians accountable for the tax policies they implement while in office. This paper demonstrates that performance voting can - partly or wholly - solve the capital levy problem. We characterise the...