The analysis undertaken in this study is motivated by the new economic environment faced by Brazil's industry since the early 1990s. In addition to the set of price stabilization policies that the country had already been struggling with during the 1980s, major economic reforms towards a greater...

Over the last several decades, manufacturers in the developed countries have adopted organizational techniques collectively referred to as lean production. An essential element of the lean production model is the specialization and decentralization of production decisions throughout the supply...

The empirical evidence presented here seems to suggest a positive relationship between economic growth and "openness" to international trade in the Brazilian experience from the 60's to the 90's. Estimates of total factor productivity growth, incorporating human capital, seemed positively...

The current financial instability experienced by Latin American countries, with the persistence of high and unstable inflation, was in part the motivation behind this project. Particularly, this work provides theoretical and empirical support to the idea of "non-neutrality" of the financial...

The debate about the uniqueness of bank loans has been around for sometime and in spite of that, no conclusive agreement has been drawn from empirical studies.

The dramatic growth performances of the newly industrializing countries (NICs) have led many economists to call them "economic miracles", and have drawn considerable attention to the hypothesis of export-led growth (ELG). In this dissertation we analyze the contribution of the export sector to...

This research explores the relationship between economic growth and trade sector performance in the context of the Italian experience over the post-Second World War period. In order to address the effects of external sector growth on Italy's pattern of industrialization and its overall economic...