Using a factor decomposition of the Gini coefficient, we measure the contribution to inequality of direct monetary income flows to and from the Brazilian State. The income flows from the State include public sector workers’ earnings, Social Security pensions, unemployment benefits, and Social Assistance transfers. The income flows to the State comprise direct taxes and employees’ social security contributions. Data come from the Brazilian POF 2008–09. We do not measure indirect contributions to inequality of subsidies granted to and taxation […]

This article assesses the effectiveness of the 2010 Nagoya Protocol to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) for addressing “biopiracy” of genetic resources; that is, their biotechnological utilization in violation of either the provider country legislation or mutually agreed contractual obligations. Biopiracy is defined as a problem resulting from a distributive conflict between provider and user countries, the practical difficulties of monitoring the utilization of genetic resources in a transnational context, and the pervasive scientific uncertainty about the nature and […]

This article deals with an issue as yet little explored in the vast literature about political participation: the role of corruption in political engagement. It investigates whether the coexistence, the values and the perception of citizens in relation to corrupt practices and actors have effects on political activism, and it verifies the direction in which this is evolving, whether it is in the direction of engagement in or withdrawal from politics. The unit of analysis is the individual, the geographic […]

This study explores the effects of electoral rules on political polarization in the legislative branch of government. Since in Brazil the districts are also the states, and senators are chosen according to the plurality-majority rule while representatives are determined by a proportional rule, the comparison between legislative chambers enables one to test whether the plurality-majority rule induces politicians to behave less moderately, and whether the proportional rule has the opposite effect. To estimate these effects, roll call data from 1988 […]

Several recently published studies analyze the effects of national conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs, such as the Brazilian Bolsa Família and the Mexican Oportunidades, on presidential elections. Most of them show that these programs boost incumbents’ electoral support among the poor. This research note is the first scholarly attempt to investigate this phenomenon at a lower-level unit of a federal state, by assessing the impact of a municipal cash transfer program on a mayoral election. Specifically, it investigates whether Renda […]

For at least 800 years the wealth of the world was concentrated in those regions that the 20th century called “Third World”. In fact, during this long period, two great nations—China and India—concentrated approximately half of the population and GDP of the world. The 19th century will stage the “Great Divergence”: the West’s fast overtaking of the ancient Asian civilizations (and more generally over the group of countries and regions of the Asian, African, and Latin American continents). The huge […]

What is the need for another book on national development policy in Brazil? In the introduction, the author, a professor of Latin American History at the University of Denver, United States, seeks to undo the impression of a possible déjà vu. He indicates that the book not only includes the extensive literature published in Brazil and abroad on the subject but also an analysis of many new empirical material collected from government and private archives of many Brazilian and American […]

Mendes’s book offers a wide-ranging primer or literature review of constitutional aspects of what may be called the law of deliberative democracy (. This cross-over field of scholarship unites deliberative and legal theory. It should be no surprise that academic interest in this new field is on the rise. The deliberative democratic turn in political theory has often been called a key development in the study of democracy. Yet though deliberative theory makes many assumptions about the functioning of courts […]