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Este artigo trata de um dos aspectos da reforma administrativa no Brasil: sua eficácia na passagem da remuneração e de outras condições de emprego do setor público a uma posição mais próxima do mercado. As reformas administrativas propõem o direcionamento de algumas tarefas, que a princípio eram de responsabilidade do governo, para o setor privado. Não é tratado aqui o problema da organização eficiente das funções governamentais (aquelas ligadas à eficiência interna), mas, em vez disso, põe em evidência o problema da insustentabilidade das reformas do serviço público, que surge se as condições de emprego permanecem notavelmente diferentes entre os setores público e privado (o problema da eficiência externa). Utilizando dados relativos ao Brasil, este artigo determina estimativas agregadas da expansão dessas distorções em diferentes níveis de governo e extrai as lições políticas. Avalia, ainda, o que está sendo feito no Brasil com relação às medidas de política sugeridas pela análise.

Since we introduced the term "middle-income trap" in 2006, it has become popular among policy makers and researchers. In May 2015, a search of Google Scholar returned more than 3,000 articles including the term and about 300 articles with the term in the title. This paper provides a (non-exhaustive) survey of this literature. The paper then discusses what, in retrospect, we missed when we coined the term. Today, based on developments in East Asia, Latin America, and Central Europe during the past decade, we would have paid more attention to demographic factors, entrepreneurship, and external institutional anchors. We would also make it clearer that to us, the term was as much the absence of a satisfactory theory that could inform development policy in middle-income economies as the articulation of a development phenomenon. Three-quarters of the people in the world now live in middle-income economies, but economists have yet to provide a reliable theory of growth to help policy makers navigate the transition from middle- to high-income status. Hybrids of the Solow-Swan and Lucas-Romer models are not unhelpful, but they are poor substitutes for a well-constructed growth framework.

The public debt crisis in Europe has shaken the confidence not just in the Euro, but in the European model. Aging and uneconomical Europeans are being squeezed between innovative Americans and efficient Asians, it is said. With debt and demographics dragging down them down, one hears that European economies will not grow much unless radically new ways are discovered. The end of complacency in Europe is a good thing, but this loss of confidence could be dangerous. The danger is that in a rush to rejuvenate growth, the attractive attributes of the European development model could be abandoned along with the weak. In fact, the European growth model has many strong points and enviable accomplishments. One can say without exaggeration that Europe had invented a "convergence machine", taking in poor countries and helping them become high income economies. World Bank research has identified 27 countries that have grown from middle-income to high income since 1987: a few thanks to the discovery and exploitation of massive natural resources (e.g.: oil in Oman and Trinidad and Tobago), several others like Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea, embracing aggressive export-led strategies which involved working and saving a lot, postponing political liberties, and looking out only for themselves. But half of the countries that have grown from middle income to high income-Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic, and Slovenia-are actually in Europe. This is why the European model was so attractive and unique, and why with some well designed efforts it ought to be made right again.

The World Bank has completed a major study of East Asian growth every four years, beginning with the seminal The East Asian Miracle in 1993. Three major developments since the early 1990s call for a reexamination of East Asian growth: the meteoric rise of China, the economic crisis of the nineties, and the rapid growth of cities. This report addresses how development strategies should be adapted in response to these changes. The region has been transformed by these developments, changing from a set of countries that rapidly integrated with the world to one that is also aggressively exploiting the sources of dynamism that lie within Asia. But countries in East Asia now face the domestic side-effects of rapid growth driven by international integration: congestion, conflict, and corruption. The challenge now is to complement global and regional integration with domestic integration. This requires ensuring vibrant cities that are not only linked to the outside world but also well-integrated domestically, strengthening social cohesion and reducing inequality, and providing clean governments which efficiently reinvest the economic returns that accompany fast growth.