A OMC e os desafios do Sistema Multilateral de Comercio - Meridiano 47

Publicado na nova página do IBRI-RBPI, com texto assinado com Rogerio de Souza Farias, neste link: http://www.ibri-rbpi.org/?p=13669
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Nota Liminar: A OMC e os desafios do Sistema Multilateral de Comércio

Em 1995, entrou em funcionamento a Organização Mundial do Comércio (OMC) — um dos muitos resultados da Rodada Uruguai de negociações comerciais multilaterais (1986-1994), que colocou em vigor diversos atos multilaterais e alguns plurilaterais, entre eles o acordo constitutivo da OMC. A nota liminar à edição especial do Boletim Meridiano 47, elaborada por Rogério de Souza Farias e Paulo Roberto de Almeida, situa a importância do debate e da produção científica sobre o tema. 

A criação da OMC não correu em um vácuo organizacional. Ao final da Segunda Guerra Mundial, uma série de encontros tentou criar uma Organização Internacional do Comércio (OIC). No encontro preparatório de Genebra, em 1947, os negociadores decidiram aproveitar a oportunidade para entabular a primeira rodada de cortes tarifários do pós-guerra, já incorporando os princípios da não-discriminação, do tratamento nacional, da reciprocidade e, mais importante, uma cláusula de nação-mais-favorecida com poucas exceções. Para regular e proteger os resultados dessas negociações, foi instituído um Acordo Geral sobre Tarifas Aduaneiras e Comércio (GATT), que vigoraria provisoriamente até a criação de uma organização internacional especificamente dedicada ao comércio, o que completaria o tripé institucional da ordem econômica multilateral do pós-guerra, iniciada pelos capítulos monetário e financeiro em Bretton Woods, em julho de 1944. Ao cabo de uma longa conferência diplomática realizada em Havana, de novembro de 1947 a março de 1948, foi criada a Organização Internacional de Comércio (OIC), incorporando todo o conteúdo do acordo negociado em Genebra, e diversos outros dispositivos relativos a emprego, a investimentos e regras institucionais. O Congresso americano, no entanto, falhou em aprovar a Carta de Havana: o resultado foi o funcionamento provisório GATT, a partir de 1948, até a criação da OMC. Arranjos ad hoc permitiram a instalação de um secretariado, dirigido por um Diretor Geral (geralmente europeu), ademais de arranjos incipientes para a solução de controvérsias comerciais entre as Partes do acordo.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida, diplomata de carreira, é professor do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Direito do Centro Unificado de Brasília – Uniceub (paulomre@gmail.com);

Rogério de Souza Farias é visiting fellow da University of Chicago e do Lemann Institute for Brazilian Studies da University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Estados Unidos.

Mapa das capitanias hereditarias ganha nova cara - Revista de Historia da Biblioteca Nacional

Mapa das capitanias hereditárias ganha nova cara

– POSTED ON 27/09/2014

http://www.rodrigotrespach.com/2014/09/27/mapa-das-capitanias-hereditarias-ganha-nova-cara/ 

Refeito recentemente, mapa das capitanias hereditárias ganha nova cara, 150 anos depois da publicação de sua versão mais conhecida

Por Alice Melo, Revista de História da Biblioteca Nacional

Por questões políticas, o rei Dom João III autorizou a colonização do Brasil 30 anos após a chegada de Pedro Álvares Cabral a este lado do Atlântico. Em 1533, a Coroa decidiu repartir as terras do além-mar entre 15 capitães donatários, gente que não tinha grande fortuna ou negócios na metrópole, mas que teria condições de administrar a nova colônia. Assim nasceram as capitanias hereditárias que, durante mais de cem anos, pareciam ser (geograficamente) “uma série de linhas paralelas ao equador que iam do litoral ao meridiano de Tordesilhas”, conforme explicou o historiador Boris Fausto em História do Brasil (1996). Um estudo publicado recentemente, no entanto, contesta a versão clássica do mapa das capitanias presente até hoje em livros didáticos, e mostra que a divisão de terras do norte do país, na verdade, seguia linhas verticais e não horizontais.

O engenheiro Jorge Cintra, professor titular de Informações Espaciais na Escola Politécnica da USP, é o autor da pesquisa que pode mudar a maneira como se visualiza a configuração do Brasil nos primeiros 50 anos de colonização. “Eu comecei a fazer um estudo sobre os limites da região Sul e encontrei alguns erros. Decidi conferir tudo e vi que o maior quebra-cabeça estava no norte”, conta.

Ao ter acesso a cópias de documentos originais, como a carta de doação a João de Barros (da capitania do Rio Grande), Cintra pôde perceber que se as linhas dos segmentos do norte seguissem para oeste, o rei estaria repassando pedaços de mar a alguns donatários. E, além disso, se mantivessem o ritmo, em paralelo, jamais se cruzariam, conforme sugere a seguinte declaração do rei de Portugal: “Léguas se estenderão e serão de largo ao longo da costa e entrarão na mesma largura pelo sertão e terra firme adentro tanto quanto puder entrar e for de minha conquista, que não sejam por mim providas a outro capitão”.

Temístocles Cézar, professor do Departamento de História da UFRGS, diz que o estudo de Cintra é “mais do que uma nova cartografia”, é uma “forma de entender o que já existe através de um exercício de desconstrução original, erudito e consistente, sem fechar a questão, mas colocando-a em um patamar mais sofisticado de argumentação”. Um tipo de estudo que não é muito realizado no Brasil.

O mapa com que Cintra dialoga – usado nos livros didáticos – foi feito no século XIX pelo historiador Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen (1816-1878), responsável em grande parte pela construção de uma visão de Brasil que prevalece até hoje. Para desenhar aquele mapa Varnhagen teria recorrido a uma cartografia de Luis Teixeira, de 1586, quando a configuração do que viria a ser o território brasileiro já era diferente. Especialista nas publicações deste grande pioneiro da historiografia brasileira, Cézar comenta que, “no caso de Varnhagen, em que pesem o número de críticas que recebe desde a publicação da História geral do Brazil  [1854-1857] e sua peculiar tendência para a polêmica, ele pouco foi contestado em relação ao material iconográfico e cartográfico de suas produções”.

Cético em relação ao alcance que este estudo pode ter, o historiador Guilherme Pereira das Neves, da UFF, opina que talvez o redesenho leve muito tempo para ser conhecido pelo grande público. “O resultado do mapa é importantíssimo, mas acho que difícil que deem importância a isso. É um tipo de resultado que se tem na história que não representa uma nova teoria. É uma correção de rumo”. Para ele, existe “um problema específico de como o Brasil lida com sua história”. Exemplo disto seria “a pouca importância que se dá a essa história. Há exemplos de best-sellers que romanceiam personagens e eventos [do nosso passado], mas que repetem os grandes jargões. Não existe preocupação em provocar o leitor a pensar uma coisa diferente. Portanto, a história não tem função crítica no Brasil, é uma memória identitária”.

Para além deste problema estrutural da relação do país com seu passado, se existe uma esperança de que a releitura chegue ao grande público, ela vai demorar ao menos três anos para se materializar, já que a seleção do MEC de material didático para a rede pública de ensino (refeita neste intervalo de tempo) acabou de ser concluída. Por enquanto, não há indícios de que editoras deste tipo de livro publicarão o estudo em suas páginas.

Fonte: Revista de História da Biblioteca Nacional

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TAGS: Brasil Colônia, Educação, História, Pesquisa

O Imperio do Algodao, livro de Sven Beckert (Delanceyplace)

Já li este livro e já postei aqui mini-trechos relativos ao Brasil traduzidos por mim. 

Quem quiser ler basta colocar palavras-chave no instrumento de busca.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

Click to sign up for Delanceyplace! Delanceyplace@gmail.com    Today's selection -- from Empire of Cotton by Sven Beckert. As with sugar before it, and steel, coal and oil after, there was a time during the 1800s that cotton was the most important commodity on the globe, powered by breakthroughs in technology such as the jenny, the water frame, and Eli Whitney's cotton gin which alone increased productivity by a factor of fifty: "[In 1860, the] cotton manufacturers and merchants [of Manchester, England] had reason to be smug: They stood at the center of a world-spanning empire -- the empire of cotton. They ruled over factories in which tens of thousands of workers operated huge spinning machines and noisy power looms. They acquired cotton from the slave plantations of the Americas and sold the products of their mills to markets in the most distant corners of the world. The cotton men debated the affairs of the world with surprising nonchalance, even though their own occupations were almost banal -- making and hawking cotton thread and cloth. They owned noisy, dirty, crowded, and decidedly unrefined factories; they lived in cities black with soot from coal-fueled steam engines; they breathed the stench of human sweat and human waste. They ran an empire, but hardly seemed like emperors. "Only a hundred years earlier, the ancestors of these cotton men would have laughed at the thought of a cotton empire. Cotton was grown in small batches and worked up by the hearth; the cotton industry played a marginal role at best in the United Kingdom. To be sure, some Europeans knew of beautiful Indian muslins, chintzes, and calicoes, what the French called indiennes, arriving in the ports of London, Barcelona, Le Havre, Hamburg, and Trieste. Women and men in the European countryside spun and wove cottons, modest competitors to the finery of the East. In the Americas, in Africa, and especially in Asia, people sowed cotton among their yam, corn, and jowar. They spun the fiber and wove it into the fabrics that their households needed or their rulers demanded. As they had for centuries, even millennia, people in Dhaka, Kano, and Teotihuacán, among many other places, made cotton cloth and applied beautiful colors to it. Some of these fabrics were traded globally. Some were of such extraordinary fineness that contemporaries called them 'woven wind.' Men, women and young children worked in the cotton mills in Lancashire, England "Instead of women on low stools spinning on small wooden wheels in their cottages, or using a distaff and spinning bowl in front of their  hut, in 1860 millions of mechanical spindles -- powered by steam engines and operated by wage workers, many of them children -- turned for up to fourteen hours a day, producing millions of pounds of yarn. Instead of householders growing cotton and turning it into homespun thread and hand-loomed cloth, millions of slaves labored on plantations in the Americas, thousands of miles away from the hungry factories they supplied, factories that in turn were thousands of miles removed from eventual consumers of the cloth. Instead of caravans carrying West African cloth across the Sahara on camels, steamships plied the world's oceans, loaded with cotton from the American South or with British-made cotton fabrics. By 1860, the cotton capitalists who assembled to celebrate their accomplishments took as a fact of nature history's first globally integrated cotton manufacturing complex, even though the world they had helped create was of very recent vintage. "But in 1860, the future was nearly as unimaginable as the past. Manufacturers and merchants alike would have scoffed if told how radically the world of cotton would change in the following century. By 1960, most raw cotton came again from Asia, China, the Soviet Union, and India, as did the bulk of cotton yarn and cloth. In Britain, as well as in the rest of Europe and New England, few cotton factories remained. The former centers of cotton manufacturing -- Manchester, Mulhouse, Barmen, and Lowell among them -- were littered with abandoned mills and haunted by unemployed workers. Indeed, in 1963 the Liverpool Cotton Association, once one of cotton's most important trade associations, sold its furniture at auction. The empire of cotton, at least the part dominated by Europe, had come crashing down." Empire of Cotton: A Global History Author: Sven Beckert Publisher: Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC Copyright 2014 by Sven Beckert Pages: x-xi Please click through to our website to purchase: www.delanceyplace.com All delanceyplace profits are donated to charity and support children's literacy projects. About Us Delanceyplace.com is a brief daily email with an excerpt or quote we view as interesting or noteworthy, offered with commentary to provide context. There is no theme, except that most excerpts will come from a non-fiction work, mainly works of history, are occasionally controversial, and we hope will have a more universal relevance than simply the subject of the book from which they came.   to go to our homepage - click here to go to our archives - click here to subscribe - click here

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Niall Ferguson "spenglerizando" nesta entrevista; readable, but...

Spenglerizar, um verbo que acabo de inventar, significa obviamente partilhar da ideia de que o Ocidente está efetivamente em decadência. 

Pode até ser, mas se não tem nada de outro para colocar no lugar, fica tudo por isso mesmo. 

Concordo com a maior parte do que Ferguson diz, inclusive sobre os riscos da China, para si mesma e para o mundo, menos com a abdicação dos EUA. Como diria Churchill, os EUA acabam fazendo a coisa certa depois de tentarem todas as demais.

Como ele diz, investidores querem preços atrativos e estabilidade política. O Brasil pode ter os primeiros mas não tem a segunda, e não vai ter enquanto o governo mafioso continuar no poder, e ele não vai sair enquanto o partido totalitário não for desmantelado pela polícia ou pela justiça, um dos dois. 

Grato a meu amigo Sérgio Florêncio por mandar-me a entrevista. 

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

INTERVIEW

Niall Ferguson Takes on the World

Ferguson sees more trouble ahead for Europe, China, and Saudi Arabia. But countries with cheap stocks and political stability could beckon investors. 

By 

VITO J. RACANELLI

Barron's, December 26, 2015

 

“There are deleterious consequences if the leading power in the world abdicates its leadership role.“—Niall Ferguson Photo: Jared Leeds for Barron’s

Niall Ferguson, the historian, Harvard professor, and author of more than a dozen books on the nexus of economics, finance, and geopolitics, argues that America’s abdication of its role as the world’s policeman is one cause of the global economic malaise. U.S. policies, or lack thereof, have allowed terrorism to breed and dictatorial states such as Russia and China to assume a larger role in world affairs.

The author of Civilization: The West and the Rest, Ferguson says China’s attempt to move to a true market economy probably will fail, potentially causing serious disruptions to other markets. He likens Saudi Arabia to Iran in 1979—a state ripe for destabilization. In the U.S., he sees tax reform coming, but worries that America’s love affair with regulation will continue to dampen its growth prospects. India gets a thumbs-up, but Europe’s prospects are bleak.

Ferguson recently announced that he’ll leave Harvard next year to become a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He spoke with Barron’s at our offices just after November’s terrorist attacks in Paris, and was every bit as thoughtful and provocative as when we last chatted, three years ago.

Barron’s: The U.S. economy has been growing by only 2% to 3% a year. Why isn’t it firing on all cylinders?

Ferguson: There are at least three theories. The seven-year hangover theory suggests that the U.S. will shake off the effects of the 2008 financial crisis next year. The secular-stagnation theory posits that, for a variety of reasons, the economy is in a depressed state. That is most obviously [expressed] in interest rates.

I’m attracted to a third argument, the geopolitical one, that says growth in modern American history has tended to be high at times of national strength and low at times of national weakness, because our weakness has ramifications for the world as a whole. One has to combine the three theories to understand why growth is lower than expectations. It isn’t low based on a pretty long-term average, but it is sluggish compared with the glory days of the Cold War.

What was so glorious about the Cold War?

There were two phases of growth, one associated with the Eisenhower and Reagan administrations, and one with the depressed period in between. Since 9/11, things have gone from bad to worse. We find ourselves in a deflationary version of the 1970s, marked by stagnation, not stagflation. [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is doing his best to give us reasons to man up. But we’re not really doing so.

The global economy needs a strong hegemonic power to reduce conflict, ensure freedom of the seas, and so forth. In the 19th century, it was Great Britain, and for much of the 20th, the U.S. But in 2013, President Obama said there was no global policeman. There are deleterious consequences if the leading power in the world abdicates its leadership role.

What are some of these ramifications?

Part of the reason the world isn’t as buoyant as it might be is that Europe is doing much worse than the U.S. It doesn’t help Europe to have a massive influx of real and “not so real” refugees. Some 220,000 people arrived in the European Union in October, a direct consequence of the disintegration of order in a whole bunch of countries, Syria principally, but not only.

The U.S. walking away from the Middle East has had a direct impact. We’re only beginning to see the ramifications, in Paris most recently. It isn’t going to stop there. There is growing anxiety in East Asia about the rise of China. Japan remains a large economy, but a depressed one in yet another recession. Economists tend to underestimate geopolitical factors because they aren’t in their models. Global order and stability need to be underwritten. It doesn’t just happen spontaneously.

Are you suggesting that the U.S. ought to be the world’s policeman?

Somebody’s got to do it. It better not be the Chinese or Russians. The market system requires an effective state that enforces the rule of law. That is true internationally, as well. As the world becomes less secure, it becomes a less safe place to do business.

A world in which the U.S. yields regional power to China or Russia is one in which the rule of law is driven back. We underestimate the extent to which the age of globalization depended on an American underwriting, and that is gradually unraveling.

Can the U.S. afford to keep the peace?

The U.S. has a fundamental problem: Gradually, its national security is being squeezed by social [benefits], particularly its health-care system. It will be squeezed by the burden of interest payments on Federal debt as interest rates go up. In theory, as the biggest economy in the world, the U.S. should be able to afford to build up its military power. In practice, the congressional budget sequester was a blunt instrument applied to the defense budget, cutting it indiscriminately.

The U.S. should be investing to maintain its lead, particularly in areas where it is vulnerable, such as cybersecurity. No matter how many aircraft carriers we have, it might not be that big of a technological leap for us to be matched in the new theaters of war that are emerging.

But as you note, our finances are hobbled.

Entitlements are the obvious problem. Republicans discovered that if you want to cut entitlements, it is hard to win the presidency. I’m optimistic that the U.S. can make its health-care system far more efficient and less expensive as new technology comes into place. With the application of technology, we will start seeing not only stuff about our own health, but also which doctors and hospitals do which things best.

The employer-pays insurance system is loopy and ripe for revolution, in the way that Uber is revolutionizing transportation. We will see similar types of companies revolutionizing health care. At that point, you may be surprised to find that costs start coming down. I can’t imagine in 10 years’ time that when you visit your doctor, someone will hand you a clipboard with a badly photocopied form that you’ll have to fill out for nth time. That’s ludicrous.

You have written about the toxic combination of litigation and regulation in the U.S. What are the odds of reform?

I don’t see any light at the end of the tunnel. The Federal Register has never been so large. The Dodd-Frank and Affordable Care Acts alone produced a staggering volume of regulation. Now we have the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, with a document even larger than Dodd-Frank. It is really disheartening. That there hasn’t been more rapid U.S. growth is due at least in part to these head winds.

Many U.S. companies won’t bring home the cash they have overseas because it would be subject to a hefty tax. Is there any chance this might change soon?

The income-tax code has to be simplified, and corporate tax has to be reduced to some internationally competitive rate. Otherwise, corporations are going to continue to emigrate to wherever the tax burden is lower. Tax reform must be on the agenda of the next president in year one. Tax reform will happen. The political class gets it; the voters get it. It is much harder to tackle excessively complex regulation because there are too many people who benefit from it.

Let’s turn to Asia. You have said that regarding China as an emerging market is absurd. Why?

It is now the second-largest economy in the world, or the largest based on purchasing-power parity, with an influence on the global economy second only to the U.S. China is sui generis. Is China is going to go further in the direction of a market economy? Will it reduce the importance of state-owned enterprises and remove the state from the financial system? Is it going to open its capital account and allow the Chinese to invest abroad freely? Each answer has ramifications for the rest of us like no other economy.

Give us your answers.

We don’t know whether China will be more of a market economy 10 years from now. It is risky for a one-party state to continue increasing the economic freedom of its citizens. President Xi Jinping, who is more interested in power than anything else, understands this well. Consequently, plans for privatization of state-owned enterprises, liberalization of the financial system, and the opening of the capital account will remain plans, but won’t be implemented.

China has created the biggest middle class in history, but middle-class people want property rights. That implies law courts and officials who aren’t corrupt. The moment you demand these things, you are asking the one-party state to loosen its grip on power. The Chinese are terrified of anything like that.

What impact might Xi’s foreign policy have on markets around the world?

To ensure the one-party state’s legitimacy, Xi won’t shy away from a relatively saber-rattling foreign policy, because this plays well [domestically]. There is also an element that isn’t propaganda. China is building up its naval capability, modernizing its pretty antiquated army. It has a financial diplomacy that has proved effective. The Chinese have been using their considerable resources to win friends and influence people around the world, including in Central Asia and Africa. China says, “Let us build your infrastructure.” That increases its leverage over a whole bunch of countries that the U.S. has neglected.

What is the outlook for India?

The Indian economy looks to be growing faster than the Chinese economy. India is good for a couple of reasons, including demographics, which turn out to be a lot more important than most people thought. India didn’t have the one-child policy, unlike China, whose workforce is shrinking.

India has rule of law—slow, maybe, but it is there, and a representative government and free press. Unless you think the success of the West is pure luck, which I don’t, those are advantages. There are many thickets of vested interest, but I’m broadly bullish about India’s prospects. The problems India faces are fixable, like infrastructure and housing. China’s problems are much more difficult.

Will the Middle East roil markets in the years ahead?

I expect next year to be more violent than 2015. Many investors don’t realize that since the outbreak of the Arab Spring in 2011, fatalities due to armed conflicts are up by about a factor of four; terrorism is up by a factor of six.

The events in Paris are a reminder that the jihadist network doesn’t confine itself to the majority-Muslim world. It is now embedded in minority-Muslim communities all over Europe. There will be more such attacks, and at some point the terrorists will be successful in the U.S. again. [This interview was conducted before radicalized Islamists killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif.] The resources that go into producing radicalism aren’t about to disappear. Networks are difficult to decapitate.

The president has failed to understand this because his model is decapitation. You think, let’s take out the boss. Then you are amazed to find the network [still] grows. We won’t see this go away in the next 10 years. The threat of violent instability in the region will go up, and probably will affect Saudi Arabia. Support for the Islamic State is high among the Saudi population.

Why is that?

An Islamic state can credibly argue that the Saudi royal family is corrupt, Westernized, and hypocritical. The family itself is divided. Saudi Arabia is a weak link, the way Iran was in 1979. If you had to ask what headline would move markets tomorrow morning, a revolution in Riyadh, especially a messy one, would be a pretty good answer. You could see a big terrorist attack on Saudi facilities, and markets would move the price of oil up.

The dollar is strong, and commodity prices are weak. What does that mean for countries like Brazil and Russia?

There comes a point when an investor says, “Hey, that’s attractively priced.” Argentina has been one of the great trades of the year. You might ask, “Where is the political problem horrible, and where is it about to get solved?” It is pretty horrible in Brazil, and I don’t see a fix in the short run. Things will be solved in Argentina, more or less. South Africa? No, that looks bad politically. Turkey? [Prime Minister Recep Tayyip] Erdogan is a dodgy customer. Egypt? I don’t like the way that’s going.

The key is attractive prices and political stability. Money is going to start flowing back into emerging markets that don’t have a political problem, such as Indonesia and maybe Malaysia. In Russia, suppose the sanctions get relaxed, as seems likely next year. Russian bonds have been one of the great performers this year. Everybody was too negative about Russia. There are some interesting opportunities in the rest of the world. It is hard to see the dollar- strength story continuing indefinitely.

What is the biggest risk to global markets?

China. It was so crucial as an engine of growth through the financial crisis. If there is a policy error in China, it could cause huge instability. The government could ease restrictions on cross-border capital flows, which would result in a great wall of money coming out of China. Money would be deployed in Western assets, and it might be difficult for China to cope. Imagine the effect on all other emerging markets, if China suddenly devalues by 20% or 30%.

On the other hand, if Xi turns the clock back, this could lead to a big downside shock.

Will Europe get its act together?

Europe faces three extraordinary challenges. It wants to have a foreign policy to be able to influence the fate of Syria, but it can’t act independently of the U.S. because it has slashed its defense capability. Secondly, Europe can’t stop this huge wave of refugees. The border is enormous, vastly larger than the Mexican border with the U.S., and much of it is a sea border.

The biggest problem is the fifth column within Europe—people who aren’t loyal to their European states even though they are citizens, second- and third-generation. Potentially, there are thousands of jihadists or sympathizers.

Europe’s problems are unsolvable. Anybody who thinks this great wave of immigration solves Europe’s demographic deficit hasn’t been to the suburbs of Paris.

On that cheerful note, thank you.