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segunda-feira, 23 de maio de 2016
Como o Ocidente (e todo o resto) se tornou rico - Deirdre MacCloskey
LIFE | IDEAS | THE SATURDAY ESSAY
The Great Enrichment of the past two centuries has one primary source: the liberation of ordinary people to pursue their dreams of economic betterment
A statue of Adam Smith in Edinburgh, Scotland PHOTO: ALAMY
By DEIRDRE N. MCCLOSKEY
The Wall Street Journal, May 20, 2016
Why are we so rich? An American earns, on average, $130 a day, which puts the U.S. in the highest rank of the league table. China sits at $20 a day (in real, purchasing-power adjusted income) and India at $10, even after their emergence in recent decades from a crippling socialism of $1 a day. After a few more generations of economic betterment, tested in trade, they will be rich, too.
Actually, the “we” of comparative enrichment includes most countries nowadays, with sad exceptions. Two centuries ago, the average world income per human (in present-day prices) was about $3 a day. It had been so since we lived in caves. Now it is $33 a day—which is Brazil’s current level and the level of the U.S. in 1940. Over the past 200 years, the average real income per person—including even such present-day tragedies as Chad and North Korea—has grown by a factor of 10. It is stunning. In countries that adopted trade and economic betterment wholeheartedly, like Japan, Sweden and the U.S., it is more like a factor of 30—even more stunning.
And these figures don’t take into account the radical improvement since 1800 in commonly available goods and services. Today’s concerns over the stagnation of real wages in the U.S. and other developed economies are overblown if put in historical perspective. As the economists Donald Boudreaux and Mark Perry have argued in these pages, the official figures don’t take account of the real benefits of our astonishing material progress.
Look at the magnificent plenty on the shelves of supermarkets and shopping malls. Consider the magical devices for communication and entertainment now available even to people of modest means. Do you know someone who is clinically depressed? She can find help today with a range of effective drugs, none of which were available to the billionaire Howard Hughes in his despair. Had a hip joint replaced? In 1980, the operation was crudely experimental.
Nothing like the Great Enrichment of the past two centuries had ever happened before. Doublings of income—mere 100% betterments in the human condition—had happened often, during the glory of Greece and the grandeur of Rome, in Song China and Mughal India. But people soon fell back to the miserable routine of Afghanistan’s income nowadays, $3 or worse. A revolutionary betterment of 10,000%, taking into account everything from canned goods to antidepressants, was out of the question. Until it happened.
What caused it? The usual explanations follow ideology. On the left, from Marx onward, the key is said to be exploitation. Capitalists after 1800 seized surplus value from their workers and invested it in dark, satanic mills. On the right, from the blessed Adam Smith onward, the trick was thought to be savings. The wild Highlanders could become as rich as the Dutch—“the highest degree of opulence,” as Smith put it in 1776—if they would merely save enough to accumulate capital (and stop stealing cattle from one another).
A recent extension of Smith’s claim, put forward by the late economics Nobelist Douglass North (and now embraced as orthodoxy by the World Bank) is that the real elixir is institutions. On this view, if you give a nation’s lawyers fine robes and white wigs, you will get something like English common law. Legislation will follow, corruption will vanish, and the nation will be carried by the accumulation of capital to the highest degree of opulence.
But none of the explanations gets it quite right. What enriched the modern world wasn’t capital stolen from workers or capital virtuously saved, nor was it institutions for routinely accumulating it. Capital and the rule of law were necessary, of course, but so was a labor force and liquid water and the arrow of time.
The capital became productive because of ideas for betterment—ideas enacted by a country carpenter or a boy telegrapher or a teenage Seattle computer whiz. As Matt Ridley put it in his book “The Rational Optimist” (2010), what happened over the past two centuries is that “ideas started having sex.” The idea of a railroad was a coupling of high-pressure steam engines with cars running on coal-mining rails. The idea for a lawn mower coupled a miniature gasoline engine with a miniature mechanical reaper. And so on, through every imaginable sort of invention. The coupling of ideas in the heads of the common people yielded an explosion of betterments.
Look around your room and note the hundreds of post-1800 ideas embedded in it: electric lights, central heating and cooling, carpet woven by machine, windows larger than any achievable until the float-glass process. Or consider your own human capital formed at college, or your dog’s health from visits to the vet.
The ideas sufficed. Once we had the ideas for railroads or air conditioning or the modern research university, getting the wherewithal to do them was comparatively simple, because they were so obviously profitable.
Storefronts along Hudson Street in New York City, circa 1860 to 1900. PHOTO: FOTOSEARCH/GETTY IMAGES
If capital accumulation or the rule of law had been sufficient, the Great Enrichment would have happened in Mesopotamia in 2000 B.C., or Rome in A.D. 100 or Baghdad in 800. Until 1500, and in many ways until 1700, China was the most technologically advanced country. Hundreds of years before the West, the Chinese invented locks on canals to float up and down hills, and the canals themselves were much longer than any in Europe. China’s free-trade area and its rule of law were vastly more extensive than in Europe’s quarrelsome fragments, divided by tariffs and tyrannies. Yet it was not in China but in northwestern Europe that the Industrial Revolution and then the more consequential Great Enrichment first happened.
Why did ideas so suddenly start having sex, there and then? Why did it all start at first in Holland about 1600 and then England about 1700 and then the North American colonies and England’s impoverished neighbor, Scotland, and then Belgium and northern France and the Rhineland?
The answer, in a word, is “liberty.” Liberated people, it turns out, are ingenious. Slaves, serfs, subordinated women, people frozen in a hierarchy of lords or bureaucrats are not. By certain accidents of European politics, having nothing to do with deep European virtue, more and more Europeans were liberated. From Luther’s reformation through the Dutch revolt against Spain after 1568 and England’s turmoil in the Civil War of the 1640s, down to the American and French revolutions, Europeans came to believe that common people should be liberated to have a go. You might call it: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
To use another big concept, what came—slowly, imperfectly—was equality. It was not an equality of outcome, which might be labeled “French” in honor of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Piketty. It was, so to speak, “Scottish,” in honor of David Hume and Adam Smith: equality before the law and equality of social dignity. It made people bold to pursue betterments on their own account. It was, as Smith put it, “allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice.”
And that is the other surprising notion explaining our riches: “liberalism,” in its original meaning of “worthy of a free person.” Liberalism was a new idea. The English Leveller Richard Rumbold, facing the hangman in 1685, declared, “I am sure there was no man born marked of God above another; for none comes into the world with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him.” Few in the crowd gathered to mock him would have agreed. A century later, advanced thinkers like Tom Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft embraced the idea. Two centuries after that, virtually everyone did. And so the Great Enrichment came.
Not everyone was happy with such developments and the ideas behind them. In the 18th century, liberal thinkers such as Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin courageously advocated liberty in trade. By the 1830s and 1840s, a much enlarged intelligentsia, mostly the sons of bourgeois fathers, commenced sneering loftily at the liberties that had enriched their elders and made possible their own leisure. The sons advocated the vigorous use of the state’s monopoly of violence to achieve one or another utopia, soon.
Intellectuals on the political right, for instance, looked back with nostalgia to an imagined Middle Ages, free from the vulgarity of trade, a nonmarket golden age in which rents and hierarchy ruled. Such a conservative and Romantic vision of olden times fit well with the right’s perch in the ruling class. Later in the 19th century, under the influence of a version of science, the right seized upon social Darwinism and eugenics to devalue the liberty and dignity of ordinary people and to elevate the nation’s mission above the mere individual person, recommending colonialism and compulsory sterilization and the cleansing power of war.
On the left, meanwhile, a different cadre of intellectuals developed the illiberal idea that ideas don’t matter. What matters to progress, the left declared, was the unstoppable tide of history, aided by protest or strike or revolution directed at the evil bourgeoisie—such thrilling actions to be led, naturally, by themselves. Later, in European socialism and American Progressivism, the left proposed to defeat bourgeois monopolies in meat and sugar and steel by gathering under regulation or syndicalism or central planning or collectivization all the monopolies into one supreme monopoly called the state.
While all this deep thinking was roiling the intelligentsia of Europe, the commercial bourgeoisie—despised by the right and the left, and by many in the middle, too—created the Great Enrichment and the modern world. The Enrichment gigantically improved our lives. In doing so, it proved that both social Darwinism and economic Marxism were mistaken. The supposedly inferior races and classes and ethnicities proved not to be so. The exploited proletariat was not driven into misery; it was enriched. It turned out that ordinary men and women didn’t need to be directed from above, and when honored and left alone, became immensely creative.
The Great Enrichment is the most important secular event since human beings first domesticated wheat and horses. It has been and will continue to be more important historically than the rise and fall of empires or the class struggle in all hitherto existing societies. Empire did not enrich Britain. America’s success did not depend on slavery. Power did not lead to plenty, and exploitation was not plenty’s engine. Progress toward French-style equality of outcome was achieved not by taxation and redistribution but by the Scots’ very different notion of equality. The real engine was the expanding ideology of classical liberalism.
The Great Enrichment has restarted history. It will end poverty. For a good part of humankind, it already has. China and India, which have adopted some of economic liberalism, have exploded in growth. Brazil, Russia and South Africa, not to speak of the European Union—all of them fond of planning and protectionism and level playing fields—have stagnated.
Economists and historians from left, right and center cannot explain the Great Enrichment. Perhaps their sciences need revision, toward a “humanomics” that takes ideas seriously. Humanomics doesn’t abandon the economics of arbitrage or entry, or the math of elasticities of demand, or the statistics of regression analysis. But it adds the study of words and meaning and their stunning contribution to our enrichment.
Over 200 years, average world income per person has soared from about $3 a day to a stunning $33 a day. PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES
What public policy to further this revolution? As little as is prudent. As Adam Smith said, “it is the highest impertinence…in kings and ministers to pretend to watch over the economy of private people.” We certainly can tax ourselves to give a hand up to the poor. Smith himself gave to the poor with a liberal hand. The liberalism of a Christian, or for that matter of a Jew, Muslim or Hindu, recommends it. But note, too, that 95% of the enrichment of the poor since 1800 has come not from charity but from a more productive economy.
Rep. Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, had the right idea in what he said to Reason magazine last year: “When people ask, ‘Will our children be better off than we are?’ I reply, ‘Yes, but it’s not going to be due to the politicians, but the engineers.’ ”
I would supplement his remark. It will also come from the businessperson who buys low to sell high, the hairdresser who spots an opportunity for a new shop, the oil roughneck who moves to and from North Dakota with alacrity and all the other commoners who agree to the basic bourgeois deal: Let me seize an opportunity for economic betterment, tested in trade, and I’ll make us all rich.
Dr. McCloskey is distinguished professor emerita of economics, history, English and communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. This essay is adapted from her new book, “Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World,” published by the University of Chicago Press.
RELATED READING
The Secret of Immigrant Genius (Jan. 15, 2016)
The Myth of Basic Science (Oct. 23, 2015)
Has the World Lost Faith in Capitalism? (Nov. 6, 2015)
MORE SATURDAY ESSAYS
In China, Xi Embraces Mao’s Radical Legacy (May 13, 2016)
Hard Truths About Race on Campus (May 6, 2016)
Brazil’s Giant Problem (April 22, 2016)
The Next Conservative Movement (April 15, 2016)
Taxation Without Exasperation (April 8, 2016)
domingo, 24 de abril de 2016
Brazil’s Giant Problem - John Lyons and David Luhnow (WSJ)
Brazil’s Giant Problem
John Lyons and David Luhnow
The Wall Street Journal, April 23, 2016
Corruption is just a symptom of Brazil’s deeper issue: a vast state apparatus that has tried to be the country’s engine of economic growth.
Founded by Portuguese monarchs who moved their court to Rio de Janeiro in 1808, Brazil has experienced almost every conceivable sort of rule over the past two centuries. Its leaders have run the gamut from emperors and dictators to democrats and former Marxists. Regardless of their politics, however, almost all of them have shared a commitment to the Leviathan state as the engine of progress.
“The problem is, from time immemorial, Brazil’s political leaders only see one way forward, the growth of the state,” said Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a former leftist intellectual who sought to reduce the size of Brazil’s government while president from 1995 to 2002. “But you need another springboard for progress, that doesn’t exclude the state but that accepts markets. This just doesn’t sink in in Brazil.”
Today, the Leviathan is sick. Brasília is embroiled in a sprawling embezzlement scandal at the state oil company, Petróleo Brasileiro SA . Investigators say that politicians, oil executives and businessmen conspired for a decade to siphon billions of dollars from the firm, channeling money to Swiss accounts and the slush funds of major political parties.
In Brazil’s Congress, where six in 10 members now face some kind of criminal investigation, lawmakers in the lower house have voted to impeach President Dilma Rousseff, a leftist economist whom many blame for fostering corruption and ruining Brazil’s economy. One vote against her came from Congressman Tiririca, a professional clown who won office campaigning that “it can’t get any worse.”
But it might. Brazil is deep in its worst recession since the 1930s, and it may not yet have hit bottom. The country’s debt tripled to $1 trillion in nine years, and some of its states are already going bust. Government insolvency is a possibility. If Ms. Rousseff is impeached, her vice president, Michel Temer, will need to rely on lawmakers implicated in the Petrobras scandal to make unpopular decisions like spending cuts to prevent Brazil’s crisis from turning into a full-blown calamity.
While many observers of Brazil’s predicament have focused on the country’s corruption, that may miss the point. Brazil’s deeper problem lies in the failures of its Leviathan state, which has perennially reached for the utopian visions embodied in Brasília but instead has produced recurring cycles of boom and dramatic bust.
A sensation of déjà vu hangs over Brasília right now. The current downturn follows one of Brazil’s greatest booms. Just a few years ago, the country appeared to be climbing into the global club of developed nations. The economy surged 7.6% in 2010, capping a decade in which millions of the poor climbed into the middle class. Diplomats opened new embassies and lobbied for a seat on the U.N. Security Council. Brazil was selected to host the 2014 World Cup and this year’s Olympic Games.
But the country has been here before. With 10% annual growth in the 1970s, some declared a “Brazilian Miracle,” only to see the 1980s become the “Lost Decade”: Inflation surged to four digits, and workers rushed out on payday to spend their wages, knowing that their money would be worthless by morning.
But it might. Brazil is deep in its worst recession since the 1930s, and it may not yet have hit bottom. The country’s debt tripled to $1 trillion in nine years, and some of its states are already going bust. Government insolvency is a possibility. If Ms. Rousseff is impeached, her vice president, Michel Temer, will need to rely on lawmakers implicated in the Petrobras scandal to make unpopular decisions like spending cuts to prevent Brazil’s crisis from turning into a full-blown calamity.
While many observers of Brazil’s predicament have focused on the country’s corruption, that may miss the point. Brazil’s deeper problem lies in the failures of its Leviathan state, which has perennially reached for the utopian visions embodied in Brasília but instead has produced recurring cycles of boom and dramatic bust.
A sensation of déjà vu hangs over Brasília right now. The current downturn follows one of Brazil’s greatest booms. Just a few years ago, the country appeared to be climbing into the global club of developed nations. The economy surged 7.6% in 2010, capping a decade in which millions of the poor climbed into the middle class. Diplomats opened new embassies and lobbied for a seat on the U.N. Security Council. Brazil was selected to host the 2014 World Cup and this year’s Olympic Games.
But the country has been here before. With 10% annual growth in the 1970s, some declared a “Brazilian Miracle,” only to see the 1980s become the “Lost Decade”: Inflation surged to four digits, and workers rushed out on payday to spend their wages, knowing that their money would be worthless by morning.
“It really begs the question: Is all this cyclical, is our economy and politics like a chicken trying to take flight, rising a few feet and then settling back down again?” said Marcos Troyjo, a former Brazilian diplomat who now teaches at Columbia University. “We seem to have returned to a spot in the past where inflation is a real threat, where debt is rising exponentially, where the president must act or the scenario deteriorates further.”
Brazil inspires optimism because it has a lot going for it. The South American nation has qualities that Americans would find familiar. It is a continent-sized nation with fertile land, abundant natural resources and a deeply ingrained sense of national destiny. Its population of 200 million is mixed, including descendants from a dark past of slavery (Brazil imported more slaves than the U.S.) and waves of European and Japanese immigration. But Brazil remained underdeveloped as the U.S. became a superpower.
“Brazil has yet to find a way to combine an enormous economic potential with the political leadership needed to sustain the needed enabling reforms,” said Mohamed El-Erian, chief economic adviser at Allianz. “As such, the economy ends up behaving like a thoroughbred horse that can run really fast on smooth ground but stumbles and falls when it gets bumpy.”
One explanation for Brazil’s stop-and-start development path is reliance on commodities. The country is even named for one: Brazilwood, used to make red dye in the 16th century. Brazil’s history can be told through commodities cycles, from sugar in the mid-1500s to coffee and rubber in the 1800s. In the early 2000s, iron, oil and soy positioned Brazil to soar as Chinese demand for the goods surged.
While commodities exports represent a small part of Brazil’s largely closed economy, they are a direct driver of growth. No other country in Latin America has a tighter correlation between commodity prices and growth, according to a survey by Morgan Stanley.
Brazil’s leaders spent much of the 20th century attempting to diversify away from natural resources, but their approach almost always relied on state banks and state companies—and it failed time and again. Juscelino Kubitschek, who built Brasília, promised “50 years of progress in five.” He created a state company to build the capital, called Novacap, and put a rival political party in charge to ensure stability. The cost of the city is still a matter of debate in Brazil, but the central bank printed so much paper money that inflation surged.
As a leftist militant in the 1960s, Ms. Rousseff was tortured by the military dictatorship, which itself tried to drive growth by creating state factories and Pharaonic projects such as giant dams. As an energy minister and later president of a left-leaning democracy, Ms. Rousseff helped to implement the same sort of industrial strategies.
Why does Brazil’s Leviathan state endure? One reason is a strong current of nationalism running through Brazilian life. Another is that it has delivered just enough on its grand promises to win the loyalty of key segments of the population.
Brazil has modernized significantly since World War II, when half the population was illiterate and much of it hungry. The government also created national health and educational systems that, though of poor quality, reach even into the country’s remote Amazon jungles.
Research by the government-backed Embrapa agricultural institute helped Brazil to expand soy and cattle ranching to the harsh soils of its West, and the country became a farming power. State initiative turned Brazil into a leader in ethanol, and the oil firm Petrobras was known as a pioneer in deep-water drilling before the corruption scandal overwhelmed it.
When Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was elected in 2002, he set the Leviathan in motion to lift the poor. A massive expansion of a welfare program called Bolsa Familia fed families while encouraging children to attend school. Birth-weights in the poor northeast rose. Other programs expanded the electricity grid to regions without light and provided water where there was little. State-subsidized mortgages turned swaths of the working class into homeowners.
“There are vast parts of our country that are poor and without security or education. The state needs to reach these people. Brazil’s history has shown that the free market simply won’t do it,” said Luiz Torelly, a bureaucrat at the state-run Institute for National and Artistic Patrimony in Brasília who defends the size of Brazil’s state.
At the same time, there are few voices in Brazilian public life to challenge the ideas of people like Mr. Torelly. There is no major political party advocating limited government. Politicians who do are likely to be derided by nationalists as sellouts to the free-market U.S.
Unlike other nations in the New World, Brazil never had a revolution that set it in opposition to an intrusive state. The Portuguese monarchy brought an entire ship filled with royal files and documents when it relocated to Rio. Successive governments have added new layers of regulation to a state that began as a royal court. In 1979, military rulers tried to pare back the bureaucracy by creating a cabinet post, the Minister of De-bureaucratization.
The result today is a bureaucracy that spends 41% of the country’s gross domestic product—about double the rate of the U.S. The return for all that tax money is questionable: poorly built roads, ports and bridges, and second-rate education and health services. As one travelers’ cliché goes, Brazil taxes like Scandinavia but has Africa-level infrastructure. In 2013, huge and sometimes violent protests erupted across the country, with protesters upset that the country was spending billions on World Cup stadiums while patients died waiting on the floors of hospital hallways.
Brazil’s government employs millions of workers, most of whom are nearly impossible to fire because of protections written into the constitution. The sheer extent of the bureaucracy and red tape stifles job creation. Brazil ranks 174th in the world for ease of starting a business, behind Uganda and Djibouti, according to the World Bank.
During the “Lost Decade” of hyperinflation in the 1980s, the Leviathan went haywire. State banks that had made bad loans to state enterprises posted enormous losses, forcing Brazil to print money to support them, which in turn created hyperinflation. The currency changed value and even names so often that old bills started circulating with rubber stamps on them showing their new denominations.
Perhaps the most insidious legacy of Brazilian’s Leviathan state is the country’s endemic corruption. Bureaucrats with broad controls become tempted to seek bribes to issue permits, licenses and contracts. Businessmen become tempted to pay them.
Brazil’s Leviathan grew so great that it gave rise to a popular theory that corruption could be a good thing because it “greased the wheels” of otherwise paralyzed bureaucracies. The idea was outlined in a 1964 paper by the American economist Nathaniel Leff, who worked extensively in Brazil.
That view was challenged in the 1990s by economists such as Paulo Mauro, who saw that corruption directly inhibits development: Officials make investments based not on the country’s best interests but on the size of the bribes they get. Matters get worse during commodity booms, when corruption expands in a tide of easy money. “Corruption becomes a system, and the bigger the system, the harder it is to break it,” Mr. Mauro said.
Exhibit A is the Petrobras scandal. After Brazil discovered massive oil fields off Rio de Janeiro, planners sought to make Petrobras a driver of development. They required the company, for example, to source oil platforms locally, with hopes of creating a ship-building industry. Investigators now say that oil executives, businessmen and politicians conspired to skim contracts from Petrobras, channeling money back to Ms. Rousseff’s Workers’ Party and its allies, including the party of Mr. Temer, the vice president who will take over if she is impeached. Ms. Rousseff and Mr. Temer are not charged and deny involvement in the scheme.
The Petrobras scandal is also a case study in opportunities squandered by Brazil’s Leviathan state. Huge investments in refineries and other projects at the center of the scandal were largely wasted—just as Mr. Mauro had predicted. In 2006, Petrobras bought an aging refinery in Texas for $1.2 billion, 30 times what it sold for just the year before. Petrobras’s new $18.5 billion Abreu e Lima refinery is eight times over budget and still incomplete. Both deals are under investigation, and neither may ever be profitable, analysts say.
The Petrobras scandal also allegedly shows how politicians used corruption to retain control. Brazil has 35 registered political parties, some 27 of which are represented in the lower house. The variety is almost comical. Aside from the Workers’ Party, there is the Democratic Labor Party, the Brazilian Labor Party, the Christian Labor Party, the Labor Party of Brazil, the National Labor Party and the Brazilian Labor Renewal Party—and those are just the parties that mention labor or workers.
Many of these parties have no ideology: They exist to capture federal funds budgeted to political parties in the constitution. Their allegiance is for sale, political scientists say. Mostly that means swapping congressional votes for control of cabinet ministries and political appointments. Some 20,000 high-ranking posts in Brazil’s bureaucracy are political appointments, including posts at Petrobras, where investigators say that officials embezzled money for their parties and themselves.
The Workers’ Party came to power vowing to wipe out corruption but was pulled into it, some longtime members say. In 2005, the party and its founder, Mr. da Silva, were rocked by the “Mensalão” vote-buying scandal. Mr. da Silva’s chief of staff resigned and was later jailed. But the economy was booming, and Mr. da Silva was re-elected.
The 84 arrests in the Petrobras scandal—among them a senator and high-profile chief executives of big construction firms—show that Brazil’s big state has at least built a judiciary with strength and independence to go after elites. Part of the credit goes to the 1988 Constitution, which ensured lifetime jobs for judges and prosecutors and shielded their budgets from politicians.
In recent years, prosecutors also won the ability to use plea bargains to offer cooperating witnesses reduced sentences. And suspects could no longer avoid jail by endlessly appealing a guilty verdict in the country’s slow courts, as they had in the past.
“The culture of compliance is sinking in fast. Companies are all persuaded they need to change their ways,” said Rubens Ricupero, a former Brazilian finance minister.
What’s unclear yet is whether the Petrobras investigations represent a watershed for Brazil or an isolated crusade driven by a few willing to exert their power. “A big reason for the independence of the judiciary was not some high-minded separation of powers, but a happy byproduct of the lobbying of judges and prosecutors who wanted job security,” says Ivar Hartmann, a law professor at the Getulio Vargas Foundation law school in Rio.
Trimming back Brazil’s Leviathan state won't be easy. As much as 85% of Brazil’s federal budget goes to spending that is guaranteed by law, from increases in retirement plans to spending on housing. Changes will require constitutional amendments.
“The trouble is, the only way to fix the politics is through the politicians,” says Mr. Ricupero. “Are they really going to vote against their own self interest?”
Write to John Lyons at john.lyons@wsj.com and David Luhnow at david.luhnow@wsj.com
sábado, 12 de março de 2016
Banco de "desenvolvimento" do BRICS: um grande negocio para a China - James T. Areddy (WSJ)
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Brasília, 12 de março de 2016
Novo banco do Brics depende do mercado chinês
O Novo Banco de Desenvolvimento (NDB), a instituição recém-criada pelos países que formam o grupo chamado Brics — Brasil, Rússia, Índia, China e África do Sul — está esperando a aprovação de reguladores chineses para emitir cerca de US$ 1 bilhão de títulos de longo prazo em yuan, disse ontem o presidente do banco, K.V. Kamath, ao The Wall Street Journal.
A decisão chinesa ajudará a determinar quando o banco poderá começar a emprestar. O conselho da instituição vai começar a analisar propostas a partir de abril.
Um projeto possível é uma usina hidrelétrica no oeste da Rússia, parte dos planos do banco de se concentrar em projetos de energia renovável.
Ele pretende emprestar para a África do Sul em rand, a moeda local, para limitar a exposição do país a possíveis oscilações do dólar. Dirigentes do banco dizem que os desembolsos podem chegar a US$ 2 bilhões neste ano e mais do que triplicar em 2017.
O mercado chinês de títulos de dívida é maior que os dos demais países e, teoricamente, mais favorável ao banco porque ele já obteve uma nota de crédito AAA no país, o que reduziria o custo de suas captações.
Mas os empréstimos no mercado de dívida interbancária do país são altamente regulados.
“Certamente, captar recursos na China é uma oportunidade”, diz Kamath. “Esperamos, nas próximas seis a oito semanas, conseguir realizar nossa primeira emissão de títulos na China.” Ele acrescentou que nenhum outro mercado de dívida parece viável no momento.
Num comunicado, os líderes do Brics expressaram frustração com sua limitada “voz e representação” nos fóruns globais, dado o tamanho de suas economias, que na época cresciam a uma média de mais de 5% ao ano.
Desde então, a queda dos preços das commodities levou o Brasil e a Rússia à recessão e enfraqueceu a África do Sul, enquanto a China atravessa uma desaceleração dolorosa. Do grupo, apenas a Índia deve registrar um crescimento mais rápido neste ano do que quando o banco foi concebido.
O FMI prevê um crescimento médio de 2% neste ano para os países do Brics.
O NBD deve começar a operar em um momento delicado. O rebaixamento da dívida soberana de alguns de seus países-membros, inclusive o Brasil, pode elevar o custo dos empréstimos para o banco nos mercados internacionais. E a desaceleração do crescimento torna ainda mais arriscados os projetos de infraestrutura de baixo retorno que os bancos de desenvolvimento costumam financiar.
Kamath disse que as economias permanecem dinâmicas e ainda precisam de financiamento para se desenvolver. “Elas podem estar desacelerando, mas, juntas, contribuem mais para o crescimento que o resto do sistema”, disse ele.
A China é essencial para as tentativas dos mercados emergentes de criar novas estratégias financeiras globais. O país também é patrocinador de outro banco de desenvolvimento recém-lançado: o Banco Asiático de Investimento em Infraestrutura.
quarta-feira, 2 de março de 2016
The Transformation of Economics - Richard K. Vedder
A lei dos retornos decrescentes provavelmente se aplica a todos os campos de conhecimento, ou melhor, de pesquisa acadêmica, terreno no qual nós -- inclusive eu próprio -- começamos a nos repetir, a fazer muito Lavoisier, a repassar e reutilizar pesquisas antigas com novos argumentos que não acrescentam muito ao já elaborado.
Quanto à ideologização, ela é muito mais disseminada nas ciências sociais, ou nas humanidades em geral, do que propriamente na economia, onde a seriedade precisa ser maior. Os puramente ideológicos, em economia, acabam ficando isolados, e são considerados bichos estranhos, embora ocorra muita matematização da "economics", o que acaba se afastando da "political economy", mas é o padrão das faculdades americanas atualmente.
Não creio que tenha havido uma desconexão entre a pesquisa acadêmica e as políticas públicas, em quaisquer setores que se possa pensar. A academia continua produzindo bons trabalhos, mas são os governos que desprezam as boas pesquisas para decisões catastróficas.
Concordo, no entanto, que pesquisas puramente universitárias podem estar cedendo terreno para pesquisas fora das universidades, nos famosos think tanks, mas este é um fenômeno americano, não brasileiro.
Não sei se o governo está penalizando o trabalho nos EUA. No Brasil certamente, pois diferentes políticas são totalmente anti-empregos, não apenas uma legislação laboral fascista, uma justiça do trabalho anacrônica e coisas absurdas como o salários mínimo, em geral e nacionalmente unifirme.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Opinion Commentary
The Transformation of Economics
Five big changes I’ve seen over the past half-century. One is economics as ideology in camouflage.
By Richard K. Vedder
The Wall Street Journal, March 1, 2016 6:30 p.m. ET
Like most economics professors, I have spent my academic lifetime examining the economic and public-policy effects of issues involving the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services—what is known as political economy. There is, however, a “political economy” to the very act of producing and disseminating economic knowledge and examining public policies. And that political economy and my assessment of it has changed over a career spanning more than half a century. Here are five developments I would emphasize:
• Diminishing returns to research. A core economic principle is the Law of Diminishing Returns. If you add more resources, such as labor, to fixed quantities of another resource, such as land, output eventually rises by smaller and smaller amounts. That applies—with a vengeance—to academic research. Teaching loads have fallen dramatically (although the Education Department, which probably can tell you how many Hispanic female anthropologists there are teaching in Arkansas, does not publish regular teaching-load statistics), ostensibly to allow more research. But the 50th paper on a topic seldom adds as much understanding as the first or second. Emory University’s Mark Bauerlein once showed that scholarly papers on Shakespeare averaged about 1,000 a year—three a day. Who reads them? How much does a typical paper add at the margin to the insights that Shakespeare gave us 400 years ago?
• Economics as ideology in camouflage. Economists who achieve fame for genuine intellectual insights, like Paul Krugman, sometimes then morph into ideologues—predominantly although not exclusively on the left. The leftish domination of American academia is partly explained by economics. Federal student-loan programs, state appropriations, special tax preferences and federal research-overhead funds have underwritten academic prosperity, even at so-called private schools. The leftish agenda today is one of big government; academics are rent-seekers who generally don’t bite the hand that feeds them. The problem is even worse in other “social sciences.”
• A disconnect between economic reality and public policy. Three examples come to mind. First, the Keynesian orthodoxy of fiscal stimulus of the 1950s and 1960s, with its Phillips curves and the like, was shown to be spectacularly wrongheaded. The U.S. experience of the 1970s and the Japanese “lost decade” of the 1990s are two demonstrations. Second, centrally planned authoritarian states with no private property or free markets (e.g., the former Soviet Union or North Korea) have been shown to be monumentally inefficient and not permanently sustainable. Third, nations with some free-enterprise capitalism but with growing redistributionist welfare states start stagnating economically—Europe beginning after 1970, the U.S. after 2000. Yet many economists (including at the Federal Reserve) still champion Keynesian policies and welfare-state expansions such as ObamaCare.
• The rise of the nonuniversity research centers. A reaction to the liberal ideological orientation and inefficiencies of colleges has spawned this phenomenon. When I was attending college around 1960, the Brookings Institution, National Bureau of Economic Research and the Hoover Institution were among relatively few major independent think tanks. Today there are many, especially ones funded on the right to provide intellectual diversity, including nationally or regionally oriented centers such as the American Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, Heartland Institute and the Independent Institute, as well as dozens of state-policy think tanks. Universities have lost market share in social-science research.
• A major cause of America’s economic malaise: the government’s war on work. My own research with Lowell Gallaway has stressed the importance of labor costs in explaining output and employment fluctuations. If the price of something rises, people buy less of it—including labor. Thus governmental interferences such as minimum-wage laws lower the quantity of labor demanded, while high taxes on labor reduces labor supply, as do public payments to people for not working.
One reason living standards in the U.S. have stagnated: There were 12.7 million fewer Americans working in January than there would have been with the 2000 employment-population ratio. Disability insurance claims have roughly tripled in the past generation (despite greater inherent workplace safety because of the declining relative importance of manufacturing and mining); government-subsidized student loans and grants have lured younger Americans away from work; extended unemployment benefits prolonged unemployment; and food stamps now go to nearly 30 million more Americans than 15 years ago. The government has provided much more income that is only available if people do not work. So fewer do. As Charles Murray has noted, this phenomenon has contributed to declining social cohesion and arguably even largely explains Donald Trump’s electoral success.
Modern computer technology and increased econometric sophistication sometimes yield useful information about the way the world works economically. But those gains are at least partially offset by the sharp decline in historical consciousness—today’s scholars sometimes think they know it all, having an arrogance arising from historical ignorance, often wasting time and energy relearning lessons that those with a good sense of economic history already know. It is still satisfying, after half a century, to try to counter that ignorance, and to teach young people the logic of the price system, the importance of private property and other institutions for freedom and prosperity.
Mr. Vedder teaches economics at Ohio University and is an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. This op-ed is adapted from an article in the Winter 2016 issue of the Cato Journal [http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/cato-journal/2016/2/cato-journal-v36n1-1.pdf]
sábado, 18 de abril de 2015
A corrupcao engole, literalmente, o Brasil - Mary Anastasia O'Grady (WSJ)
O candidato derrotado à presidência do Brasil, Aécio Neves, parece falar em nome de muitos dos seus compatriotas quando diz que o PT e a presidente Dilma Rousseff utilizaram dinheiro roubado para derrotá-lo nas eleições presidenciais ocorridas no país em outubro de 2014.
terça-feira, 6 de janeiro de 2015
Pronto: para nao dizer que nao falei da posse...
Eu não havia falado em posse porque não estava em posse de todas as minhas faculdades: estava de recesso, viajando e fazendo coisas melhores (lendo Isaiah Berlin, por exemplo) do que acompanhando acontecimentos prosaicos.
Mas, para não dizer que não acompanhei tão importante acontecimento na agenda nacional e internacional deste nosso país, vai aqui uma simples colagem, deste novo instrumento temerário e não temeroso da imprensa online, O Antagonista, cujo nome já me agradou, ainda que eu preferisse O Contrarianista. A postagem é do próprio dia 1/01/2015, e é muito maldosa, como parece que vai ser esse pasquim contrarianista/antagonista.
Mas é o que encontrei como resumo:
O mundo segundo Dilma: de Guiné-Bissau a Guiné Equatorial.
Mundo A imprensa estrangeira, até agora, ignorou a posse de Dilma Rousseff. New York Times, Washington Post, La Repubblica, Corriere della Sera, Le Monde, The Guardian, Financial Times: silêncio constrangedor. Os únicos chefes de Estado que vieram a Brasília para prestigiar a presidente, excluindo os latino-americanos, foram os de Guiné-Bissau, Guiné Equatorial e Gana. O Brasil sempre contou pouco, agora conta menos ainda.Acrescento (PRA): no dia 2/01/2015, The Wall Street Journal, esse legítimo representante dos especuladores da rua do mesmo nome, dos loiros de olhos azuis que andam fazendo tsunami só para acabar com a pujança da economia brasileira, dava esta manchete:
Brazil Leader Starts Term on Shaky Ground
(matéria assinada de Brasília por Paulo Trevisani e Jeffrey T. Lewis)
Confesso que não tive paciência de ler pois já conheço os shaky grounds da economia brasileira muito bem, e sei que os jornalistas mal conhecem toda a história de roubalheiras que caracteriza o quadro atual do Brasil.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
quinta-feira, 30 de outubro de 2014
Brasil: o estatismo ganhou - Mary Anastasia O'Grady (Instituto Mises)
Assim como nos EUA, o Brasil também possui uma classe alta formada por eleitores urbanos de esquerda, que se sentem virtuosos em defender a intervenção estatal na vida de outras pessoas e em ajudar a ditadura cubana. Porém, existe também um Brasil mais ambicioso, o qual é formado por empreendedores que se arriscam, por agropecuaristas competitivos globalmente e por uma ascendente classe média que anseia enormemente por uma maior integração com o resto do mundo. Esses brasileiros queriam desesperadamente uma mudança para mais mercado e mais capitalismo, e viram no candidato Aécio Neves um representante mais próximo dessa mudança. Foram esses brasileiros que fizeram com que as eleições presidenciais do último domingo fossem a mais apertada da história do Brasil.
Com esse resultado apertado, Dilma tem agora de descobrir o que fará com seus próximos quatro anos. De um lado, ela pode imaginar ser possível consolidar o poder do PT — seu objetivo supremo — dando continuidade às políticas que utilizou até agora, não importa os custos para a economia. Alternativamente, ela pode optar por fazer ajustes econômicos pragmáticos com o objetivo de restaurar a confiança e o crescimento.
Essa última opção é até possível, mas é bem improvável, pois os militantes do seu partido, que ganharam poderes e engordaram suas contas bancárias durante os governos do PT, querem ainda mais poder, e não menos. Dilma pode até fazer algumas declarações aparentemente conciliatórias e, no curto prazo, implantar algumas medidas em prol de um pouco mais de liberdade econômica, como fez seu mentor Lula nos primeiros anos de seu governo, quando ele tinha o objetivo de acalmar os mercados que estavam em queda por temor de seu novo governo. Uma vez alcançado esse objetivo, no entanto, Lula voltou para a esquerda.
As chances são de que Dilma fará o mesmo, assegurando por mais quatro anos a já tradicional reputação do Brasil para a mediocridade. Somente se uma investigação criminal comprovar que Dilma e Lula sabiam sobre o esquema de corrupção na Petrobras é que as coisas podem se alterar substantivamente.
A grande ironia da campanha eleitoral é que, enquanto Dilma e Lula reivindicavam todo o crédito pelo crescimento econômico que o Brasil vivenciou na década de 2000, ambos se opuseram às reformas estruturais ocorridas na década de 1990. A privatização de empresas estatais, a abertura (ainda que limitada) da economia brasileira à concorrência estrangeira, e a reforma monetária de 1994, que criou o real e acabou com a hiperinflação — todas essas medidas estimularam o desenvolvimento e, devido a essa geração de riqueza, possibilitaram a criação de programas assistencialistas mais generosos, os quais são a marca registrada do PT.
Não fossem essas reformas da década de 1990 — às quais o PT se opôs —, não haveria chances de sucesso para os subsequentes governos do PT na década de 2000.
O problema é que o PT não quis aprofundar essas reformas, e a consequência é que o "milagre brasileiro" morreu no berço. Na mais generosa das avaliações, o país é visto hoje como apenas mais um entre vários países em desenvolvimento; já na maioria das vezes, ele é visto lá no fim da fila.
Nem Lula e nem Dilma parecem se preocupar com desenvolvimento econômico. De acordo com um relatório do Goldman Sachs, de 2004 a 2013, os gastos do governo cresceram a um ritmo de 8% ao ano, em termos reais, o que representou um crescimento mais de duas vezes maior do que o crescimento do PIB. A inflação de preços está hoje em quase 7% ao ano para aqueles bens e serviços cujos preços não são controlados pelo governo. E quando se considera apenas o setor de serviços, a inflação de preços está em 8,6% ao ano. Para piorar, as expectativas quanto à inflação futura estão se deteriorando.
Dilma imaginou que poderia conter a carestia congelando o preço da gasolina, a qual é ofertada pela Petrobras, e o preço do etanol, o qual é ofertado por usineiros locais e utilizado por carros flexíveis em combustível. No entanto, dado que os custos de produção continuaram aumentando (por causa da inflação crescente), a Petrobras e o setor sucroalcooleiro estão incorrendo em severos prejuízos. Várias usinas de álcool já faliram e várias outras estão por falir. Elas não sobreviverão caso essa política de congelamento de preços continue.
O PT se gaba de ajudar os pobres com políticas assistencialistas, mas a mesma mão que dá é aquela que tira — e a mão que tira é a mais pesada. O aumento do protecionismo, os pesados encargos sociais e trabalhistas que oneram a folha de pagamento das empresas, os altos impostos sobre o consumo, uma infraestrutura em frangalhos, e as inflexíveis leis trabalhistas geram custos que impedem o aumento dos salários e que fazem com que o padrão de vida dos brasileiros esteja muito aquém do seu potencial.
Ainda mais preocupante é o estrago que o PT pode fazer com as instituições e com o estado de direito ao longo dos próximos 48 meses. A sociedade civil brasileira é uma forte defensora das liberdades civis e do pluralismo. No entanto, como um sagaz empresário me confidenciou, "Estamos vivenciando, passo a passo, uma tendência rumo à Argentina, à Bolívia e ao Equador". Um exemplo é o decreto de maio, assinado por Dilma, que cria os "conselhos populares", os quais criariam um modelo semelhante ao que já existe na Venezuela. Até o momento, o Congresso vem oferecendo resistência. Porém, se o tradicional esquema de compra de votos ocorrer, ele pode capitular.
Trata-se de uma perspectiva pavorosa para qualquer pessoa que conheça um pouco de história. Como já havia observado no século XVIII o filósofo David Hume: "A liberdade não é abolida de uma só vez; o processo ocorre em etapas."
Hoje, Dilma é apenas uma política que ganhou uma eleição. No futuro, os brasileiros podem aprender que o governo de um partido só e regras indefinidas são os verdadeiros projetos de longo prazo do PT.
terça-feira, 12 de agosto de 2014
Eleicoes 2014: um possivel ministro da Fazenda, Arminio Fraga - The Wall Street Journal
Brazil Ex-Insider Returns to Help Oust President
Luciana Magalhães
The Wall Street Journal, August 12, 2014
With slow growth and high inflation hurting Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff's chances of winning a second term, a financial heavyweight has joined the opposition to persuade voters that Brazil needs a new economic steward.
Arminio Fraga, a former central banker, has been advising Aecio Neves of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party for several months. He's now talking openly of returning to government, perhaps as finance minister, if Mr. Neves can pull of an upset in October's presidential elections.
"I wouldn't make myself available if I didn't feel deeply bothered, and I am," Mr. Fraga, 57, said last week in an interview in his office in Rio de Janeiro.
Ms. Rousseff still holds a comfortable lead heading into the first round of voting October 5. But recent polls show Mr. Neves closing the gap in the event of a runoff, which is looking increasingly likely.
The president's Achilles' heel is the economy. GDP growth likely won't crack 1% this year; some analysts are even predicting a recession. But it is Brazil's stubbornly high inflation, which is hovering at around 6.5%, that is most worrisome to many voters. As recently as the 1990s, Brazil was bedeviled with hyperinflation; automatic cost-of-living increases are still built into salaries, rents and pensions.
Mr. Fraga appears to be positioning himself as something of an inflation whisperer. As president of Brazil's central bank from 1999 to 2002 under the administration of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, he helped stabilize the currency and rein in consumer prices. Mr. Fraga supports restrained public spending, tough inflation targeting and a floating exchange rate, policies that became known in Brazil as the "economic tripod."
He is highly critical of the Rousseff administration's decision slow inflation by capping gasoline prices and electricity rates, moves he dismissed as "gimmicks." He's also alarmed that Brazil's central bank has been intervening regularly in the currency markets to prop up Brazil's real against the dollar, a strategy he ridicules a "populist move."
Mr. Fraga said these are stopgap measures that already are proving unworkable and that Brazil needs to focus on long-term fundamentals like increasing private investment and balancing its books. Credit agency Standard & Poor's earlier this year cut the credit rating on Brazil´s long term bonds to one notch above junk, citing deteriorating government accounts and rising debt.
"We have to give up on these gimmicks that have a lot of side effects and focus on bringing inflation down," Mr. Fraga said.
After leaving the central bank, Mr. Fraga helped found Gávea Investimentos, an asset management firm with around $7 billion in assets under management. He also served as chairman of Brazil's BM&F Bovespa SA, BVMF3.BR +0.91% Latin America's largest stock exchange. Earlier in his career he worked at Soros Fund Management LLC in New York for 6 years.
But whether those prestigious credentials help boost Mr. Neves chances at the presidency remains to be seen.
A spokesman for Ms. Rousseff declined to comment. But on the campaign trail, the president and her political mentor, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, constantly remind voters that millions of Brazilians have been lifted from poverty since their Workers´ Party ascended to power with Mr. da Silva's election in 2002.
Economist Luiz Gonzaga Belluzzo, who has advised both Ms. Rousseff and Mr. da Silva, noted Mr. Fraga's ideas didn't translate into robust growth for Brazil.
"They speak about the 'economic tripod' as if it were holy trinity, but the fact is that during the eight years of Cardoso government the economy grew very little, an average of only 2.3%," said Mr. Belluzo, who is also an academic and writer.
Mr. Fraga contends that many Brazilians sense the country is on the wrong path and that current pessimism about the economy is well-founded.
"I believe our history proves that high inflation, high budget deficit and weak balance of payments have never been good for growth, on the contrary," he said.
domingo, 27 de julho de 2014
Como o "desenvolvimentismo" diminui o crescimento e a renda - Harold L. Cole, Lee E. Ohanian (WSJ)
Existem dezenas de exemplos de políticas equivocadas e mesmo de crimes econômicos, cometidos contra os interesses do Brasil e dos trabalhadores.
Parece que não adianta argumentar com eles, pois são obtusos, obstinados, teimosos.
Talvez este artigo sobre a história econômica da Grande Depressão, nos EUA dos anos 1930, sirva para ensinar alguma coisa a esses patriotas equivocados.
O artigo é exclusivamente sobre as políticas econômicas do New Deal, mas ele tem tudo a ver com as concepções erradas dos companheiros que se acreditam desenvolvimentistas e são só trapalhões...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida