Suchergebnisse

"Soft" slavery in Brazil: Was Gilberto Freyre right? This article examines the question of the supposedly benign character of Brazilian slavery, in contrast with slavery in North America. In economic analyses of slavery, coercion toward slaves is viewed as a means to achieve maximum output, especially in large-scale agriculture. In small slave holdings, however, coercion was generally inefficient for that purpose, and positive incentives tended to be preferred. It is argued that, as recent evidence on Brazil has shown that small slave holdings prevailed, in various regions and periods, this may lend empirical support to the notion of a relatively benign slavery, using more incentives than coercion. (Rev Econ Polit/GIGA)

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the political economy of preferential trade agreements based on a sequential non-cooperative Stackelberg political game between a large economy and a small one, in which the political dispute of rival lobby groups defines the unilateral stance of both governments in the first stage and the Stackelberg "coalition-proof" equilibrium defines t the free trade agreement format in the second stage. Finally, a few modifications in the initial game structure are discussed in order to enhance the small economy's negotiation power. The political economy model is applied to FTAA case. (Rev Econ Polit/GIGA)

State exports in Brazil: estimations of price and income elasticities. This paper analyses the recent performance of Brazilian exports, based on estimations of price and income elasticities of states external sellings. After presenting an overview of the national position, the aim is to check if, by exporting dynamic goods of high value, some of them were able to achieve an external position different from Brazilian's. Nevertheless, the results, as the ones obtained by other empirical works, indicate that all but one states have inelastic exports with respect to both prices and income. (Rev Econ Polit/GIGA)