Tag Archives: Institutions

Almost a decade ago, The Economist had a cover story about the Brazilian economy taking off. Everything seemed fine, with the Brazilian economy on the verge of surpassing Britain and France, and on its way to economic development. Among the reasons given for the Brazilian success was the fact that the country had “established some strong political institutions.” But many other factors were cited, like fiscal restraint, an independent central bank, openness to foreign direct investment,...

Nicola Acocella published a paper in the Journal of Economic Surveys (a free, preliminary version is available here) a paper on the development of the theory of economic policy. Acocella is clearly fully aware of the differences between classical political economics and marginalism (neoclassical economics). And he dismisses the pre-margnialist views on economic policy as being unsystematic and devoid of general principles. In his words: Most classical writers and the marginalists had...

So, a few days ago, someone (my bad, can't remember who did it) posted on FB a piece (in Portuguese and behind a wall; but this post is mostly about the role of historical comparisons really, so you can skip the piece altogether) on the Brazilian National Development Bank (Portuguese acronym is BNDES, btw) and how it lend more than the US government with the Marshall Plan. The guy did a back of the envelope calculation (I did check and bringing the US$ 13 billion to present value, with the...