This paper aims to demonstrate how the responses of public health officials to judicial decisions have shaped drug distribution policies in the state of São Paulo. Data was collected and structured interviews were conducted at the state of São Paulo Department for Health in order to show how different strategies of response to judicial decisions affected the policy of medication distribution by the public sector. We also analysed recent Supreme Federal Court jurisprudence to show how the Court reformed its […]

Is there Executive interference in the regulatory agencies after its formal establishment as independent bodies? Under what conditions the Executive chooses to interfere in the agencies? This paper analyses the degree of interference in Brazilian national regulatory agencies and provide a tentative explanation for the variation in the degree of interference. The basic hypotheses is that credibility costs, the degree of formal independence and the preferences of presidents are crucial factors affecting the extent to which presidents interfere in the […]

This article discusses the military relations between Brazil and United States in the Cold War. Focusing on the dynamic of these relations and on arms transfers, one argues that the Brazilian military sought in the USA a path towards organizational modernization, industrialization and regional supremacy. Thus Brazil operated a movement from a very close and dependent position to a more distant one, since Washington did not support Brazilian objectives of military modernization and strategic autonomy and the anticommunist agenda became […]

This paper analyses intergovernmental relations in Brazil based on the dynamics of the distribution of federal discretionary transfers to the states between 1997 and 2008. The theme becomes more relevant when we consider the process of fiscal recentralization that has taken place in Brazil, particularly from 1994 on, and the importance of discretionary transfers for state budgets. Our purpose is to identify which factors can account for a higher or lower state’s share in overall resources, by building on two […]

The aim of this article is to analyse the process of expansion of the Belo Horizonte Metropolitan Area, created in 1973 with 14 municipalities, which today comprises 34 municipalities, making it the second largest MA in Brazil. After the redemocratization, more specifically after the promulgation of the State Constitutions in the late 1980s, several new metropolitan areas were created in the country, and all nine MAs instituted in the early 1970s increased their number of member municipalities, in a context […]

Edgar Dosman’s The life and times of Raúl Prebisch (1901-1986)’ is the kind of book that might catch the attention of scholars working within different agendas, research interests and disciplines. Those interested in Latin American history and politics will probably note how Dosman underlines Raúl Prebisch’s contributions – both as an intellectual and as a policymaker – to regional and international debates on development and modernization in the Global South. The impact of Dosman’s work on the current debates on […]