Despite the lack of consensus on the appropriate concept of ‘social capital’, research in the area has continued even in the most criticized macroeconomic area. The investigation about the importance of social capital to generate differences in regional per capita income (per capita income...

This study examines whether social capital is an element that has a significant relationship with Brazilian states’ economic performance in the period of 1996 to 2008. The issue is addressed by the ideas of Bourdieu (1980, 1986), Coleman (1988, 1990) and Putnam et al. (1993), considering that...

The article covers the general situation of construction works carried out in the traditional roadway infrastructure by the Provincial Government of Minas Gerais, between 1840 and 1889. The principal sources are Highway and Bridge Construction Processes, generated within the scope of the Public...

We estimate the components of income per worker of the states of Brazil through level decompositions, in 1970, 1980, 1990 and 2000. Relative differences, with respect to São Paulo, in the productivity of labor were due to relative differences in capital and in total factor productivity. In...

This paper aims to present causality tests between financial system and economic growth in the frequency domain for Brazil, India, France, Japan, United States and Korea. This approach allows to capture nonlinearities in the direction of the causality from short to longer terms. Indeed 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...

The accumulation of human capital plays a crucial role in growth theories and it is incorporated in the growth models in a very simplified way. Therefore it does not take into account the economic development process complexity. They consider that the amount of human capital is an important...

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...

Using Thirwall´s model, we can conclude that the restriction of the balance of payments was crucial in the determination of the Brazilian economic growth in the period 1947-2000. The estimated income elasticity of the demand for imported products, based on the extended Thirwall´s model, was...

This paper analyses the sustainability of the Brazilian federal fiscal policy by examining the responses of the government budget surplus to variations of the debt-GDP ratio. The approach to assess sustainability, originally proposed by Bohn (1998), circumvents the problems present in...