This paper explores the link between Brazil's political institutions and its disappointing productivity and growth in recent decades. Although political institutions provide the president with incentives and the instruments to pursue monetary stability and fiscal discipline they simultaneously...

This paper argues that the effects of the food price crisis of 2007-08 put pressure on two variables that are of central importance to the Brazilian government: inflation and social inclusion. We describe how political institutions in Brazil in the past 25 years have given rise to a...