O que é este blog?

Este blog trata basicamente de ideias, se possível inteligentes, para pessoas inteligentes. Ele também se ocupa de ideias aplicadas à política, em especial à política econômica. Ele constitui uma tentativa de manter um pensamento crítico e independente sobre livros, sobre questões culturais em geral, focando numa discussão bem informada sobre temas de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil. Para meus livros e ensaios ver o website: www.pralmeida.org. Para a maior parte de meus textos, ver minha página na plataforma Academia.edu, link: https://itamaraty.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida.

segunda-feira, 15 de outubro de 2012

Google Scholar: indulging in narcisism (PRA)

Estava, como sempre faço, fazendo pesquisa no Google Scholar (bem melhor do que o Google geral, pela seletividade dirigida a determinados temas), e resolvi colocar o meu próprio nome, entre aspas, para ver quantos resultados seriam indicados. Deu isso (na base em inglês, os resultados são menores: About 191 results):

SCHOLAR 1470 results

Reproduzo apenas a primeira página:

Tip: Search for English results only. You can specify your search language in Scholar Settings.

[CITATION] O Mercosul no contexto regional e internacional

PR de Almeida - 1993 - Edições Aduaneiras

[HTML] Relações internacionais e política externa do Brasil

PR de Almeida - 1998 - pralmeida.org

2077. O Bric ea substituição de hegemonias: um exercício analítico (perspectiva histórico-
diplomática sobre a emergência de um novo cenário global), Brasília, 31 dezembro 2009,
31 p. Ensaio preparado para projeto do IPEA, sob a coordenação de Renato Baumann ( ...

Cited by 109 Related articles Cached

[HTML] Uma política externa engajada: a diplomacia do governo Lula

PR Almeida - Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional, 2004 - SciELO Brasil

Comparative essay, constrasting the foreign policies of Fernando Henrique Cardoso's and
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's administrations. Besides the general features of each diplomacy,
external policies and practices of each government are compared for a set issues of the ...

[BOOK] O estudo das relações internacionais do Brasil

PR de Almeida - 1999 - pralmeida.org

Os historiadores, em geral, mas sobretudo os de tradição francesa, conhecem bem a
distinção entre história factual, ou événementielle, e história analítica, ou interpretativa. A
primeira derivava seus métodos da boa cepa rankeana–aquela do wie es eigentlich ...

[CITATION] Os primeiros anos do século XXI: o Brasil e as relações internacionais contemporâneas

PR de Almeida - 2002 - Paz e Terra

Cited by 39 Related articles

[CITATION] Mercosul, Nafta e Alca: a dimensão social

PR de Almeida - 1999 - Editora LTr

Cited by 35 Related articles

[CITATION] O Brasil eo multilateralismo econômico

PR de Almeida - 1999 - Livraria do Advogado Editora

Cited by 40 Related articles

[BOOK] Formação da diplomacia econômica no Brasil: as relações econômicas internacionais no Império

PR de Almeida - 2001 - books.google.com

Oautor, estudioso e diplomata, descreve as primeiras etapas da diplomacia econômica no
Brasil, cujo marco inicial se deu há quase dois séculos. A obra apresenta a diplomacia
comercial, a diplomacia financeira, a aquisição de tecnologia e os fluxos de investimento ...

[PDF] Uma nova arquitetura diplomática? Interpretações divergentes sobre a política externa do governo Lula (2003-2006)

PR Almeida - Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional, 2006 - SciELO Brasil

A política externa do governo Luís Inácio Lula da Silva, que começou em 1º de janeiro de
2003, tem chamado a atenção dos observadores externos e dos estudiosos internos, em
vista de vários aspectos inovadores em sua formulação e execução, assim como em ...

PR de Almeida - 2004 - pralmeida.net

Paulo Roberto de Almeida Diplomata, doutor em Ciências Sociais pela Universidade de
Bruxelas, mestre em Planejamento Econômico pela Universidade de Antuérpia.
(pralmeida@mac.com; www.pralmeida.org) ... 2. Primeiras experiências de ...

Em inglês, deu isto:

[CITATION] Lula's Foreign Policy: Regional and Global Strategies

PR De Almeida - Brazil under Lula: Economy, politics, and …, 2008 - Palgrave Macmillan

[PDF] from fes.de

[PDF] Brazil as a Regional Player and an Emerging Global Power

PR De Almeida - Foreign Policy Strategies and the impact on the New …, 2007 - library.fes.de

The aim of the following essay is to show the main lines of Brazilian foreign policy in the
current presidency of Luís Inácio Lula da Silva. It will present the latter's chief initiatives on
the international level, combined with a discussion of the players that may determine ...

[CITATION] The'New'Intellectual Property Regime and its Economic Impact on Developing Countries

PR ALMEIDA - Liberalization of Services and Intellectual Property in …, 1990

Cited by 4 Related articles

[PDF] from scielo.br

[PDF] Never Before Seen in Brazil: Luis Inácio Lula da Silva's grand diplomacy

PL RoBeRto de aLmeida - Rev. Bras. Polít. int, 2010 - SciELO Brasil

Has Brazil already attained the status of a global power, as sought by Luis Inácio Lula da
Silva's diplomacy? Or, despite all his efforts, does it remain a mere regional power? Those
two questions were, almost obsessively, at the center of Lula's entrepreneurial diplomacy, ...

[PDF] from cigilibrary.org

Brazil and the G8 Heiligendamm process

D Gregory, PR de Almeida - Emerging Powers in Global …, 2008 - books.google.com

A new economic geography has taken shape, with many more players whose aspirations to
play a stronger role in the global economic decision-making process need to be addressed.
The rules of the game and the team of international institutions put in place after the ...

[BOOK] Envisioning Brazil: A Guide to Brazilian Studies in the United States

MC Eakin, PR de Almeida - 2005 - books.google.com

Envisioning Brazil is a comprehensive and sweeping assessment of Brazilian studies in the
United States. Focusing on synthesis and interpretation and assessing trends and
perspectives, this reference work provides an overview of the writings on Brazil by United ...

[CITATION] The International Protection of Integrated Circuits

PR ALMEIDA - Copyright World, 1989

Cited by 3 Related articles

Presidentialization, pluralization, and the rollback of Itamaraty: Explaining change in Brazilian foreign policy making in the Cardoso-Lula era

JW Cason, TJ Power - International Political Science Review, 2009 - ips.sagepub.com

... A painstaking study by Paulo Roberto de Almeida (2006b) of all of Lula's foreign travels, meetings
with high-ranking foreign officials, and participation in multilateral activities showed a total of
263 direct presidential participations in diplomacy between January 2003 Page 7. ...

Cited by 42 Related articles

[PDF] from stanleyfoundation.org

[PDF] Brazil's Candidacy for Major Power Status

M Diaz, PR Almeida - Stanley Foundation, 2008 - stanleyfoundation.org

... Studies. Mr. Diaz is a married to a Foreign Service officer and currently resides
in Tokyo. Paulo Roberto de Almeida is Ph.D. in Social Sciences and Master in
International Economy. He is also a career diplomat since 1977. ...

Explaining Latin American economic integration: the case of Mercosur

K Kaltenthaler, FO Mora - Review of International Political Economy, 2002 - Taylor & Francis

... and economic motivations in Buenos Aires and Brasilia, it is important to emphasize, as noted
by Secretary Pena and others, that Argentina was more inter- ested in pursuing economic
objectives, while Brazil, as Brazilian diplomat Paulo Roberto de Almeida and consultant ...

Brasil e Mexico: qual o futuro dos dois? - The Economist

Free exchange -

Growth

Economics, The Economist

Will Brazil remain the country of the future?

Oct 8th 2012, 20:09 by D.W. | LONDON

THE question of whether the Mexican economy might one day regain the top spot in the Latin American league tables has once again become an interesting one. In 2010, many thought it had been settled. The Brazilian economy, more than double the size of Mexico’s, grew at a 7.5% annual rate while Mexico puttered forward at close to 2%. What a difference two years makes. While the Brazilian economy is shambling along at an annualised rate of 1.9% so far in 2012, the Mexican economy is set to grow at 3.9%. If this trend continues, some reckon the Mexican economy will overtake Brazil’s as soon as 2022.

One believer is Benito Berber, Nomura’s Latin America strategist. In a recent report Mr Berber applies Solow growth accounting to a series of forecasts on Mexico and Brazil, with striking results:

Solow splits the contributing factors to economic growth into three categories: human capital (or worker skill levels), physical capital, and total factor productivy, which is essentially a residual that accounts for remaining, unexplained growth. Between 2000 and 2010 Mexico fell behind Brazil in human-capital terms thanks to competition from Chinese labour, lagging education, and incomplete labour-market reforms. This was amplified by steady emigration to America. By contrast, Brazil benefited from a “formalisation” of the labour market as 40m Brazilians entered the middle classes over the decade. A commodities boom led to big investments in Brazil, bringing up its investment-to-GDP figure from 15% to 19%. Mexico’s dependence on America's economy and a manufacturing sector heavily exposed to China led to disappointing gains from physical capital accumulation and total factor productivity.

Yet despite a slow start to the millennia, things are looking up for Mexico across all three of Robert Solow’s measures. Firstly, high manufacturing costs in China are improving the competitiveness and demand-environment for Mexican factories. Secondly, Brazil may have become too dependent on commodity-led growth. While moving resources to the commodity sector allowed Brazil to exploit a comparative advantage, many now see limited opportunity to improve total factor productivity, something which is usually limited to manufacturing. And although Brazil enjoyed a strong reforming government led by Hernando Cardozo in the 1990s, the last decade has been one of increasing welfare costs rather than additional reform. In Mexico by contrast, a newly reinstated PRI, a centre-right party, has promised to continue along the path of supply-side reform pursued by the previous government.

Mr Berber concludes that under a low growth estimate for Brazil and a high growth estimate for Mexico, the countries cross economic paths in 2022 (see chart). This is of course highly speculative; forecasting a decade ahead is notoriously difficult. Yet that such outcomes seem reasonable is remarkable given the conventional wisdom just a few years ago.

If the Mexican economy is to one day take over the Brazilian, it would be a boon for liberal economics in the face of Brazil’s more statist approach. Yet do not expect Brazil to give up the top spot easily. Indeed, a friendly rivalry may benefit both countries’ reform agendas.

Embrapa Internacional: repensando a agenda - novo presidente

Novo presidente da Embrapa diz que orientação é ampliar atuação no exterior

Danilo Macedo

Agência Brasil, 12 / 10 / 2012

O novo presidente da Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária (Embrapa), Maurício Antônio Lopes, disse na quinta-feira (11) que a orientação do governo é para que a empresa intensifique sua atuação internacional. Pedro Arraes, seu antecessor, foi afastado e exonerado do cargo na semana passada após o Conselho de Administração da instituição concluir que houve descumprimento legal e estatutário na criação da Embrapa Internacional, desconstituída por decreto pelo ministro da Agricultura, Mendes Ribeiro Filho.

Lopes disse que uma sindicância interna está apurando o caso e as responsabilidades de cada envolvido na criação do braço internacional da Embrapa, mas avaliou que houve um equívoco da gestão anterior. Segundo ele, embora o modelo concebido anteriormente tenha sido extinto, a orientação de Mendes Ribeiro é para que se trabalhe numa alternativa para agilizar a atuação internacional.

“O que aconteceu foi um problema com relação à forma como a Embrapa Internacional foi criada. Não quer dizer que a empresa vai regredir ou diminuir a ênfase em sua cooperação internacional. Vamos buscar formas para que a atuação no exterior possa se dar de forma rápida e ágil”, disse, acrescentando a importância da empresa na divulgação da imagem do Brasil no exterior.

Entre as prioridades de sua gestão, Lopes citou o aprimoramento do sistema de inteligência estratégica da Embrapa – considerando que a empresa tem 47 unidades no país, quase dez mil empregados, sendo 2.410 pesquisadores – e ainda desenvolve pesquisas no exterior com laboratórios dos Estados Unidos, da França, Alemanha, Coreia do Sul e do Japão.

O novo presidente disse também que a Embrapa reforçará as pesquisas no setor sucroalcooleiro. “A Embrapa tinha feito a opção de não operar muito efetivamente nesse setor, mas ele se tornou extremamente importante e crítico para o Brasil.”

Lopes disse, no entanto, que o setor não pode mais pensar apenas em cana-de-açúcar, considerando outras opções para aumentar a capacidade de produção de energia renovável, como o sorgo sacarino. Na visão do novo presidente, o país tem uma condição única de converter todo o seu parque sucroenergético em biorrefinarias, transformando também biomassa em vários produtos, assim como é feito hoje com o petróleo, mas por meio de uma fonte renovável.

No segundo dia à frente de uma das empresas de pesquisa agropecuária mais respeitadas do mundo, Lopes disse que a criação da Embrapa, na década de 1970, se deu num momento em que o Brasil não tinha segurança alimentar. Em tempo recorde, a empresa e o país desenvolveram uma agricultura tropical pujante, a mais desafiadora do planeta em sua opinião.

“Agora há uma série de outros desafios. É um momento de mudanças muito rápidas de paradigmas, com a questão ambiental, influenciada pelo novo Código Florestal, e mudanças climáticas que vão representar ainda mais desafios para a nossa agropecuária”, disse. No novo cenário, Lopes explicou que a Embrapa deve investir cada vez mais em biotecnologia, acesso cada vez maior a recursos genéticos, e instrumentação avançada focando na agricultura de precisão, para ajudar a preservar o meio ambiente.

Affirmative Action: American Style (rethinking the wole) - The New York Times

CAPITAL IDEAS

Rethinking Affirmative Action

The New York Times, October 13, 2012

THE founding principle of affirmative action was fairness. After years of oppression, it seemed folly to judge blacks by the same measures as whites.

“You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race,” President Lyndon B. Johnson said in a 1965 speech that laid the groundwork for affirmative action, “and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”

Given this history, it was striking to watch the 80 minutes of Supreme Court oral arguments about affirmative actionon Wednesday. With the courtroom overflowing, filled with people who have spent their careers fighting for or against affirmative action, only one side talked about fairness. And it was not the side defending affirmative action.

The lawyer for Abigail Fisher, a young white woman rejected by the University of Texas, argued that she had been denied equal treatment. The conservative justices, sympathetic to Ms. Fisher’s case, expressed particular concern that affluent black students were receiving preferential treatment.

Nobody on the other side — not the university’s lawyer, not the Obama administration’s, not the liberal justices — responded by talking about the obstacles that black and Latino students must overcome. The defenders of affirmative action spoke instead about the value of diversity. Without diverse college classes, they argued, students will learn less and society will lack for future leaders.

The decision to emphasize diversity over fairness is one that affirmative-action proponents made long before Wednesday, and it is a big reason they find themselves in such a vulnerable position today.

Americans value diversity. But they value fairness more. Most people oppose a college’s or employer’s rejecting an applicant who appears qualified for the sake of creating a group that demographically resembles the country.

With affirmative action boiled down to a diversity program, it finds itself in retreat. Five of the six states that have held referendums on racial preferences have banned them, including California and Florida. The Supreme Court limited the legal forms of preferences in 2003 and suggested that they had only 25 years left. Based on last week’s oral arguments, and the fact that Justice Anthony Kennedy has never voted to uphold preferences, the court may restrict them further or forbid them.

Yet supporters of affirmative action do not necessarily need to despair. They still have apath open to them, one that remains legal and popular. It involves resurrecting Johnson’s vision of an affirmative action program based on fairness, which the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. also favored.

The crucial choice that affirmative-action proponents made long ago was to focus the program on race rather than more broadly on disadvantage.

There were some obvious reasons to do so. Americans have never been comfortable talking about class. It reeks of the social order the country rejected at its founding (Britain’s) and of the economic system the country spent decades fighting (communism). But race was an undeniably American problem, from slavery to civil rights to the discrimination that, according to voluminous social-science research, lingers.

By forgoing a broader view of disadvantage, colleges lost the ability to claim that their overriding goal was meritocracy. “That was the key moment, when they forfeited fairness,”Richard D. Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation, who has written a book about affirmative action, told me.

Institutions using affirmative action could not claim to be bringing everybody — rich and poor, white and black, native and immigrant — up to the same starting line, in Mr. Johnson’s formulation. They instead were creating a system that depended on racial categories.

From a legal perspective, the decision made the supporters’ task harder. The very laws intended to address the country’s racial history set a high bar for any race-based system. In its first major affirmative-action ruling, the Bakke case of 1978, the Supreme Court rejected the notion that society-wide discrimination justified preferences for individuals. The court reaffirmed that finding in 2003, while also reaffirming that diversity was a legitimate rationale.

It is impossible to know whether affirmative action could have had a more enduring foundation were it based on a broader equal-opportunity approach. Proponents never tried this alternative. Courts, however, have consistently upheld socioeconomic preferences. Had black and Latino students been benefiting from those preferences, as many would, at least some portion of affirmative action might be in less peril.

But the liberals behind the great successes of the civil rights and women’s movements never showed as much interest in economic diversity. On college campuses, administrators have insisted for years that they care about disadvantage, beyond race, but they have done relatively little about it. They have preferred a version of diversity focused on elites from every race.

Black and Latino college applicants, as well as athletes and so-called legacies, receive large preferences — the equivalent of 150 to 300 SAT points. Low-income students, controlling for race, receive either no preference or a modest one, depending on which study you believe. At the country’s 200 most selective colleges, a mere 5 percent of students come from the bottom 25 percent of the income spectrum, according to Anthony P. Carnevale of Georgetown. In court on Wednesday, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. attacked the political underbelly of this system. The University of Texas argued that diversity within racial groups was also important, citing “the African-American or Hispanic child of successful professionals in Dallas.” Skeptically, Justice Alito asked the university’s lawyer, “They deserve a leg up against, let’s say, an Asian or a white applicant whose parents are absolutely average?”

Justice Kennedy followed up by telling the lawyer, in one of the most quoted lines of the day, “So what you’re saying is that what counts is race above all.”

Even in California, which has banned racial preferences, race can still dominate the debate. Richard H. Sander, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, has found some hard-to-explain patterns in U.C.L.A.’s undergraduate admissions. The college has accepted a significantly higher percentage of blacks and Latinos than whites and Asians with the same “holistic score,” a number the admissions office gives to every applicant, based on test scores, grades, extracurricular activities and obstacles overcome. U.C.L.A. officials say that the holistic scores do not fully capture the obstacles some students face.

Back in the 1960s, Dr. King understood the vulnerability of today’s affirmative action. “Many white workers whose economic condition is not too far removed from the economic condition of his black brother will find it difficult to accept,” he wrote in a private letter, “special consideration to the Negro in the context of unemployment, joblessness, etc. and does not take into sufficient account their plight (that of the white worker).”

If the courts and voters continue to restrict racial preferences, supporters will have three options. They can give up, which is unlikely. They can quietly subvert the law, as some critics, like Mr. Sander, believe is happening in California. Or they can attempt an overhaul of affirmative action.

The economic argument for a different version has only become stronger over time. Outright racism certainly exists, and colleges would have a hard time taking it into account if race-based affirmative action became illegal. But simple discrimination seems to have become a relatively smaller obstacle over the last few decades, while socioeconomic disadvantage has become a larger one.

The title of a recent paper by Roland G. Fryer Jr., a Harvard economist, summarizes the trends: “Racial inequality in the 21st century: The declining significance of discrimination.”

Racial gaps remain large enough that colleges would struggle to recruit as many black and Latino students without explicitly taking race into account. But some experts, like Mr. Kahlenberg, think they could come close. To do so, they would need to consider not just income, but also wealth, family structure and neighborhood poverty. Those factors disproportionately afflict black and Latino students — and hold back children from life’s starting line.

Mr. Kahlenberg argues that wealth is especially defensible, because it can capture discrimination’s intergenerational effects. Some universities in states where racial preferences are banned, including California, have begun taking small steps to consider class more fully.

Until the Supreme Court rules, sometime next year, the focus will be on its decision. And its decision matters. Yet the choices that universities make matter, too. You wouldn’t have known it from sitting in the courtroom, but there is a version of affirmative action — legal, generally popular and arguably more meritocratic — that higher education has not yet even tried.

David Leonhardt is the Washington bureau chief of The New York Times.

domingo, 14 de outubro de 2012

Famintos do mundo: o bilhao imaginario - The Economist

Burocracias, governamentais e internacionais, e politicas publicas antimercado, contribuem para a fome.

Feast and famine

Demography and development

Hunger

Not a billion after all

The Economist, Oct 10th 2012, 10:24 by J.P.

IN 2010, as food prices were spiking for the second time in three years, governments, international agencies and non-government organisations blared out a new and powerful fact: there were a billion hungry people in the world and this, they said, in a period of plenty, was a disgrace. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), which had estimated the figure in an annual report, even had the words ‘one billion hungry’ draped in letters 50 feet high outside its headquarters building in Rome. The number of hungry people in the world is indeed a disgrace. But there was one problem with the precise figure: it was completely bogus. This week, in its 2012 report on the state of food insecurity in the world, the FAO quietly revised it down to 868m and got rid of the spike in the numbers that had supposedly occurred in 2008-10.

The charts above show the new estimates (left hand panel) compared with those for 2010 (right hand panel). Detailed comparisons are complicated by the fact that many of the plots are for slightly different periods. But the big change is clear: instead of a sharp rise and fall in 2008-10, tracking the world food-price spike, the number of hungry people stayed stable throughout the 2000s. For developing countries, the new hunger estimates are lower after the price spike than they had been before it, falling from 885m in 2004-05 to 852m in 2010-12.

There are statistical and methodological explanations for the change. The 2010 report used the computer model of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to estimate the impact of high food prices. The USDA model is primarily designed to calculate how much food countries need to import. So it pays a lot of attention to trade and to importing nations but does not do such a good job of explaining what is going on in countries that are self sufficient or which use price and other controls to reduce the impact of world-price movements on domestic prices. These include China, India and Indonesia, the three largest developing countries. There, increases in staple-food prices were very small in 2007-10. In contrast, the new methodology pays more attention to daily diets and habitual consumption. This means it provides better estimates of chronic undernourishment but, as the report itself says, “does not fully capture the effects of price spikes.”

The FAO has also improved its data collection. New figures for the vast amount of food that gets wasted on farms and in shops pushed up the figures for the number of hungry people in 1990 (from 850m to 1 billion) but not in 2010-12. This alone accounts for much of the decline in hunger numbers in the past 20 years.

At the same time, there is a “real” reason for the lower estimates of hunger (ie, independent of methodological or statistical changes). The great recession of 2008-09 resulted in only mild slowdowns in most developing countries, so incomes were less affected than was expected: people could afford to keep buying food. At the same time the spread of conditional-cash transfers and other programmes to help the poor seems to have been remarkably effective at sheltering the worst off from the impact of price rises. In short, poor countries turned out to less vulnerable to food crises than previously thought.

The new estimates have significant implications. The world is not doing quite such a bad job of feeding itself as many people fear. At the moment, food prices are rising again for the third time in five years, leading to renewed worries about a food crisis and to demands for drastic intervention in world food markets (banning exports or taxing “commodity speculators”, for example). The new figures suggest the worries may be overdone and so are the demands that accompany them. The supply response to high prices seems to be better than expected. Social-protection measures seem to work. A simple measure of how well the world is doing is the first millennium development goal which calls for halving the proportion of people who suffer from hunger between 1990 and 2015, ie from 23% in 1990 to 11.5% in 2015. The proportion now is 14.9, only slightly above target.

That said, hunger is still high and, in two parts of the world, is growing. In sub-Saharan Africa, the number of hungry people rose by 1m a year in 2000-05 but by more than 6m a year between 2007-09 and 2010-12. In the Middle East and North Africa, there are almost twice as many hungry people now as there were in 1990-92 (41m compared with 22m). It is also worth saying that undernutrition may not have spiked, the world still faces a big problem of poor nutrition (lack of micro-nutrients, as opposed to lack of calories). So the news is good on average, but not everywhere.

It may still take some time to be believed. The notion that there are a billion hungry people was so widely trumpeted that it has taken on a life of its own. On the very day the new FAO figures appeared, Gordon Conway, a professor at Imperial College London, published a (very good) book on food called—you guessed it—One Billion Hungry. Even the UN’s own food bureaucracies have not caught up with the new facts. The same report that details the new numbers also contains a contribution from four UN food agencies (including the FAO) to the big environmental conference held in Rio de Janeiro this July (the Rio +20 meeting). It refers to the old numbers.

Progressos do Apartheid oficial no Brasil: cotas gerais, extensas, permanentes

Folha de S.Paulo, 14/10/2012 - 06h00

Dilma vai criar cota para negro no serviço público

JOÃO CARLOS MAGALHÃES
NATUZA NERY
DE BRASÍLIA

O Palácio do Planalto prepara o anúncio para este ano de um amplo pacote de ações afirmativas que inclui a adoção de cotas para negros no funcionalismo federal.

Opinião: Medida pode fixar um novo marco nas relações raciais

A medida, defendida pessoalmente pela presidente Dilma Rousseff, atingiria tanto os cargos comissionados quanto os concursados.

O percentual será definido após avaliação das áreas jurídica e econômica da Casa Civil, já em andamento.

O plano deve ser anunciado no final de novembro, quando se comemora o Dia da Consciência Negra (dia 20) e estarão resolvidos dois assuntos que dominam o noticiário: as eleições municipais e o julgamento do mensalão.

O delineamento do plano nacional de ações afirmativas ocorre dois meses depois de o governo ter mobilizado sua base no Congresso para aprovar lei que expandiu as cotas em universidades federais.

A Folha teve acesso às propostas. Elas foram compiladas pela Seppir (Secretaria de Políticas de Promoção da Igualdade Racial) e estão distribuídas em três grandes eixos: trabalho, educação e cultura-comunicação.

A cota no funcionalismo público federal está no primeiro capítulo: propõe piso de 30% para negros nas vagas criadas a partir da aprovação da legislação. Hoje, o Executivo tem cerca de 574 mil funcionários civis.

No mesmo eixo está a ideia de criar incentivos fiscais para a iniciativa privada fixar metas de preenchimento de vagas de trabalho por negros.

Ou seja, o empresário não ficaria obrigado a contratar ninguém, mas seria financeiramente recompensado se optasse por seguir a política racial do governo federal.

Outra medida prevê punição para as empresas que comprovadamente discriminem pessoas em razão da sua cor de pele. Essas firmas seriam vetadas em licitações.

EDUCAÇÃO E CULTURA

No campo da cultura, há uma decisão de criar incentivos para produtores culturais negros. Na semana passada, a ministra Marta Suplicy (Cultura) já anunciou que serão lançados editais exclusivos para essa parte da população.

No eixo educação, há ao menos três propostas principais: 1) monitorar a situação de negros cotistas depois de formados; 2) oferecer aos cotistas, durante a graduação, auxílio financeiro; 3) reservar a negros parte das bolsas do Ciências sem Fronteira, programa do governo federal que financia estudos no exterior.

A implantação de ações afirmativas é uma exigência do Estatuto da Igualdade Racial, aprovado pelo Congresso em 2010, o último ano do segundo mandato de Lula.

Segundo o estatuto, é negro aquele que se diz preto ou pardo --juntas, essas duas autodefinições compõem mais da metade dos 191 milhões de brasileiros, de acordo com o Censo de 2010.

ESSENCIAL

O plano é tido no governo como essencial para diminuir a desigualdade gerada por diferenças de cor e ampliar a queda na concentração de renda na última década.

Nesse sentido, o plano, ao usar unicamente critérios raciais, seria mais cirúrgico do que o sistema de cotas aprovado pelos congressistas em agosto, que reserva metade das vagas nas federais para alunos egressos de escolas públicas e, apenas nessa fatia, institui a ocupação prioritária por negros e índios.

Politicamente, será um forte aceno da gestão Dilma aos movimentos sociais, com os quais mantém uma relação distante e, em alguns momentos, conflituosa --como durante a onda de greves de servidores neste semestre.

	Editoria de Arte/Folhapress

Antigamente, no tempo em que os animais falavam...

...muito antigamente, um certo partido que dizia se pautar na ética para fazer política -- ou será que ele apenas fazia a política da ética, usando esta última de forma fraudulenta apenas para ter vantagens políticas? -- tinha por hábito expulsar de seus quadros todos aqueles que tinha incorrido em desvios éticos, justamente, e a mais forte razão todos aqueles que fossem condenados por atos de corrupção, de malversação, de roubo, enfim, de qualquer crime tipificado no Código Penal.
Lembro-me de dois ou três casos nessa linha, um, pelo menos, envolvendo um parlamentar, os demais funcionários do partido ou simples militantes da causa.

Pois bem: quando é que esse partido vai expulsar três, pelo menos, dos seus condenados?
Estamos esperando.
Ou aquela postura não era para valer?
Ou valia só para os "bagrinhos", e não para os "mais iguais"?

Ficam as perguntas, mas não espero respostas...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

sábado, 13 de outubro de 2012

Deja vu comercial, all over again: de volta aos anos 1950-60?

Na mira da OMC

Editorial O Estado de S.Paulo, 13 de outubro de 2012

Nem todas as medidas adotadas pelo governo brasileiro para proteger a produção nacional ferem as regras do comércio internacional, mas nem todas estão inteiramente de acordo com as normas e, assim, livres de contestações formais na Organização Mundial do Comércio (OMC) que podem resultar em alguma forma de sanção. Todas, porém, têm sido alvo de críticas cada vez mais acerbas dos principais parceiros comerciais do Brasil, pois afetam o livre fluxo de bens e serviços, o que tem forçado o governo brasileiro, em alguns momentos, a elevar o tom para tentar justificar suas decisões. Nem assim, porém, o Brasil tem conseguido convencer os críticos.

"A atitude do Brasil manda um sinal negativo e deve afetar o fluxo de investimentos diretos para o País", advertiu a União Europeia na reunião do Comitê de Investimentos da OMC realizada em Genebra. A crítica - acompanhada da ameaça velada de suspensão de investimentos - se referia ao fato de que medidas de proteção da indústria brasileira anunciadas como temporárias e de emergência tendem a se perenizar.

Uma das decisões do governo brasileiro mais criticadas na OMC foi a imposição de alíquotas diferenciadas do IPI para os automóveis, com aumento de até 30 pontos para aqueles com menos de 65% de conteúdo nacional. Essa medida, de acordo com seus críticos, é discriminatória e, por isso, passível de sanção pela OMC.

Também representantes dos Estados Unidos, do Japão e da Austrália na OMC criticaram o aumento da taxação dos automóveis estrangeiros no mercado brasileiro, bem como a exigência de pelo menos 60% de conteúdo nacional para as empresas poderem participar dos leilões para telefonia de quarta geração (4G), o primeiro dos quais foi realizado em junho.

Em geral, o governo brasileiro tem respondido às críticas com acusações. Tem dito, por exemplo, que os países ricos também são protecionistas, sobretudo na agricultura. Quanto aos Estados Unidos, a crítica da presidente Dilma Rousseff - e repetida por ela no discurso de abertura da Cúpula América do Sul-Países Árabes realizada em Lima, no Peru - é ao que chamou de "tsunami monetário", que desvaloriza o dólar e, assim, torna os produtos americanos mais competitivos, constituindo o que ela considera um "protecionismo disfarçado".

Já a diplomata Márcia Donner Abreu, respondendo às críticas na reunião do Comitê de Investimentos da OMC, afirmou que as medidas tomadas pelo governo brasileiro não são discriminatórias, atendem às regras do comércio internacional e se destinam a melhorar a competitividade do Brasil. O representante americano reagiu com ironia, perguntando se conteúdo nacional implicava uma "tecnologia brasileira", e como seria definida essa tecnologia.

São variadas as medidas protecionistas que o Brasil passou a utilizar nos últimos tempos, sob a alegação de que elas são necessárias para evitar danos à economia decorrente do súbito aumento das importações. Entre elas estão o aumento das tarifas de IPI, das tarifas do Imposto de Importação para 100 produtos (ainda que dentro dos limites permitidos pela OMC), a inclusão proximamente de mais 100 itens na lista dos que terão sua taxação elevada e aumento do rigor dos controles administrativos e da fiscalização, que retardam a entrada de produtos estrangeiros no País.

A prática deverá demonstrar que medidas como essas não compensam as dificuldades crescentes que, por causa delas, o País enfrenta no relacionamento com seus principais parceiros comerciais nem são eficazes para melhorar a produção interna. Por enquanto, o descontentamento dos principais parceiros com as medidas protecionistas tomadas pelo Brasil tem se limitado aos questionamentos cada vez mais frequentes e mais enfáticos na OMC. No plano interno, porém, o aumento do protecionismo torna o setor produtivo mais acomodado e cada vez menos disposto a se modernizar, buscar mais eficiência e oferecer ao consumidor brasileiro bens de qualidade internacional.

O País já viu isso acontecer - e pagou caro.