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segunda-feira, 1 de julho de 2013

Investimento Estrangeiro: sempre positivo para as economias recebedoras? (Estudo da Columbia)

Columbia FDI Perspectives
Perspectives on topical foreign direct investment issues by
the Vale Columbia Center on Sustainable International Investment
No. 98   July 1, 2013
Editor-in-Chief: Karl P. Sauvant (Karl.Sauvant@law.columbia.edu)
Managing Editor: Jennifer Reimer (jreimer01@gmail.com)
 
Do host countries really benefit from inward foreign direct investment?
by
Byungchae Jin, Francisco García and Robert Salomon*

It was with great interest that we read Perspective No. 84 addressing the impact of inward foreign direct investment (IFDI) on technological innovation and entrepreneurship.[1] In that issue, Pathak, Laplume, and Xavier-Oliveira laid out arguments for and against IFDI. They suggested that we have, for far too long, extolled the benefits of IFDI for developing economies, without properly accounting for its costs. They noted that there are genuine concerns that we ought not to overlook, and that we should pay special attention to the impact of IFDI on local innovation and entrepreneurship. Understanding the relationship between IFDI and innovation is an important policy issue, as it can help inform whether, and how, IFDI can stimulate economic growth.

Central to addressing the debate regarding the effect of IFDI on local innovation is to determine whether foreign entrants enhance the innovativeness of local firms, or crowd out domestic innovation. One line of reasoning suggests that IFDI ought to lead to greater levels of local innovation as a result of knowledge spillovers to local firms. In addition, foreign entrants provide local firms an incentive to innovate as a means to compete, or in the case of vertical linkages, better to meet technical supply requirements.

Another line of reasoning casts doubt on the positive impact of IFDI, suggesting that foreign entrants relegate local firms to less innovative, less profitable market niches. Moreover, since foreign firms generally pay higher wages, foreign entrants might attract higher-skilled labor, leaving domestic firms short on talent -- a key ingredient to innovation. Foreign entry can also reduce the expected returns to entrepreneurship, creating a situation in which the best would-be entrepreneurs prefer to take employment with foreign firms instead of founding new enterprises.

In order to address one aspect of this debate, we studied the effects of IFDI on productivity and innovation in the manufacturing sector of Spain from 1990 through 2002.[2] During that period, Spain received nearly 45 billion of IFDI in manufacturing.[3] And though Spain is not a developing economy by traditional metrics, relative to its OECD counterparts, it is a laggard. Hence, Spain is considered a middle-income, developed country;[4] and given its position between developed and developing markets, Spain makes an interesting setting in which to test the relationship between IFDI and innovation.

Interestingly, as IFDI increased in specific industries, Spanish manufacturing firms improved their productivity (both total factor productivity and labor productivity). However, as IFDI rose in those same industries, Spanish firms subsequently applied for fewer patents and introduced fewer new products.

These findings highlight the importance of distinguishing between productivity and innovation when considering the net benefits of IFDI. Productivity and innovation might not capture the same outcomes, and may therefore speak to two very different aspects of the debate.

For example, productivity captures short-run improvements in allocative and technical efficiency. Therefore, to the extent that Spain lags the global technological frontier in high-tech manufacturing,[5] we may simply observe productivity increases as a result of a catch-up effect -- i.e., Spanish firms adopting the more efficient manufacturing techniques that entrants bring with them.

Innovation, by contrast, may be a better indicator of the long-run consequences for growth. To the extent that IFDI crowds out local innovation, it may fail to provide desired growth outcomes. IFDI may actually hinder the development of technological capabilities among local firms and, hence, the long-term growth prospects of local economies.[6]

Circling back to the issue of whether to encourage IFDI as a matter of policy, there is reason for pause. Our findings call into question whether IFDI can serve as a long-run growth catalyst, or whether it simply offers a short-term fix. Sure, IFDI may spur job creation, increase tax revenues and improve the productivity of local firms. Those outcomes benefit the host country and are welfare enhancing in the near term. However, as a consequence of IFDI, local innovation may become impaired, dampening long run economic growth, development and social welfare.

All things considered, there are potential tradeoffs between IFDI’s near-term benefits and its long-run costs. This is not to say that IFDI should be discouraged. Rather, policies that subsidize foreign entry ought to be thought through carefully. Policymakers would be well served to pay special attention to tradeoffs, and enact policies that are consistent with long-term development objectives.[7]

The material in this Perspective may be reprinted if accompanied by the following acknowledgment: “Byungchae Jin, Francisco García and Robert Salomon, ‘Do host countries really benefit from inward foreign direct investment?,’ Columbia FDI Perspectives, No. 98, July 1, 2013. Reprinted with permission from the Vale Columbia Center on Sustainable International Investment (www.vcc.columbia.edu).” A copy should kindly be sent to the Vale Columbia Center at vcc@law.columbia.edu.
 
* Byungchae Jin (bjin@sfu.ca) is Assistant Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Beedie School of Business at Simon Fraser University in Canada; Francisco García (fgarciap@uniovi.es) is Assistant Professor of Management at the School of Economics and Business, Universidad de Oviedo; Robert Salomon (rsalomon@stern.nyu.edu) is Associate Professor of International Management and the Daniel P. Paduano Family Fellow of Business and Ethics at the NYU Stern School of Business. The authors are grateful to John Kline, Wolfgang Sofka and Zheying Wu for their helpful peer reviews. The views expressed by the authors of this Perspective do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Columbia University or its partners and supporters. Columbia FDI Perspectives (ISSN 2158-3579) is a peer-reviewed series.
[1] Saurav Pathak, André Laplume and Emanuel Xavier-Oliveira, “Inward foreign direct investment: Does it enable or constrain domestic technology entrepreneurship?,” Columbia FDI Perspectives, No. 84 (December 3, 2012).
[2] Francisco García, Byungchae Jin and Robert Salomon, “Does inward foreign direct investment improve the innovative performance of local firms?,” Research Policy, vol. 42 (February 2013), pp. 231-244.
[3] OECD Statistics Database.
[4] Guillén Mauro. The Rise of Spanish Multinationals: European Business in the Global Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
[5] Robert Salomon and Byungchae Jin, “Does knowledge spill to leaders or laggards? Exploring industry heterogeneity in learning by exporting,” Journal of International Business Studies, vol. 39 (January 2008), pp. 131-150.
[6] García, Jin and Salomon, op. cit.
[7] John Kline, “Evaluate sustainable FDI to promote sustainable development,” Columbia FDI Perspectives, No. 82 (November 5, 2012).

For further information, including information regarding submitting to the Perspectives, please contact: Vale Columbia Center on Sustainable International Investment, Jennifer Reimer, jreimer01@gmail.com. In addition to her role as Research Associate for the VCC, Ms. Reimer is Legal Counsel for LG Electronics’ Regional Headquarters for the Middle East and Africa.
==========
The Vale Columbia Center on Sustainable International Investment (VCC), led by Lisa Sachs, is a joint center of Columbia Law School and the Earth Institute at Columbia University. It is the only applied research center and forum dedicated to the study, practice and discussion of sustainable international investment, through interdisciplinary research, advisory projects, multi-stakeholder dialogue, educational programs, and the development of resources and tools.

Most recent Columbia FDI Perspectives
·       No. 97, Abdoul’ Ganiou Mijiyawa, “Myopic reliance on natural resources: How African countries can diversify inward FDI,” Columbia FDI Perspectives, June 17, 2013.
·       No. 96, Louis T. Wells, “Infrastructure for ore: Benefits and costs of a not-so-original idea,” Columbia FDI Perspectives, June 3, 2013
·       No. 95, Terutomo Ozawa, “How do consumer-focused multinational enterprises affect emerging markets?,” Columbia FDI Perspectives, May 20, 2013.”
·       No. 94, Stephan Schill and Marc Jacob, “Common structures of investment law in an age of increasingly complex treaty-making,” Columbia FDI Perspectives, May 6, 2013.
·       No. 93, Xiaofang Shen, “How the private sector is changing Chinese investment in Africa,” Columbia FDI Perspectives, April 15, 2013.
·       No. 92, Vid Prislan and Ruben Zandvliet, “Labor provisions in bilateral investment treaties: Does the new US Model BIT provide a template for the future?,” Columbia FDI Perspectives, April 1, 2013.
·       No. 91, Anthony O’Sullivan and Alexander Böhmer, “The Arab Awakening, act II: Time to move more boldly on investment,” Columbia FDI Perspectives, March 18, 2013.
·       No. 90, Shaun E. Donnelly, “A business perspective on a China - US bilateral investment treaty,” Columbia FDI Perspectives, March 4, 2013.
·       No. 89, Joachim Karl, “Investor-state dispute settlement: A government’s dilemma,” Columbia FDI Perspectives, February 18, 2013.
·       No. 88, Jarrod Wong, “The compensatory nature of moral damages in investor-state arbitration,” Columbia FDI Perspectives, February 4, 2013.

All previous FDI Perspectives are available at http://www.vcc.columbia.edu/content/fdi-perspectives.

Alianca do Pacifico: progressos rapidos para o livre comercio e ampliacao

Enquanto o Mercosul patina na liberalização interna, não consegue avançar externamente e tenta incorporar a dois bolivarianos (Equador e Bolívia), ademais do próprio bolivariano-chefe (a Venezuela, que não se sabe quando irá cumprir seus compromissos de desgravação e incorporação da TEC), a Aliança do Pacífico consolida o processo interno de livre-comércio e expande seus vínculos externos, ademais da incorporação de novos membros.
Representantes do Mercosul podem sempre dizer que o comércio recíproco dos quatro países é muito reduzido, que eles já liberalizaram o que tinham de fato consolidado nos acordos comerciais com alguns grandes parceiros (UE, EUA) e que o seu modelo livre-cambista de economias exportadoras de commodities (o que não vale para o México, e vale muito mais para o Brasil, por sinal) não serve para economias industrializadas como Brasil e Argentina, mas o fato é que credibilidade é algo que se ganha com passos nessa direção, não na direção contrária, como têm feito os membros do Mercosul.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Alianza del Pacífico profundiza su integración por la vía del libre comercio
America.comDom, 30/06/2013 - 20:13

De los avances conseguidos, el que más repercusión económica debe tener es el acuerdo de desgravación arancelaria que, según el ministro de Comercio de Colombia, se concluirá antes de que termine julio.
La Alianza ha concluido el 92% de la desgravación arancelaria en su comercio de bienes y servicios.

La Alianza del Pacífico, formada por Chile, Colombia, México y Perú, se confirmó este domingo como modelo de integración regional al anunciar que ha concluido el 92% de la desgravación arancelaria en su comercio de bienes y servicios y que el otro 8% lo terminará en los próximos 30 días.

El anuncio lo hicieron los titulares de Relaciones Exteriores y de Comercio de los cuatro países en una rueda de prensa que dieron este domingo en Villa de Leyva, ciudad colonial del centro de Colombia, para presentar los avances de la VIII Reunión Ministerial del bloque, que examinó lo acordado en la cumbre presidencial celebrada en mayo en Cali (suroeste).

"Hemos avanzado tan rápido que los derroteros están casi todos cumplidos", dijo la canciller colombiana, María Ángela Holguín, anfitriona de la cita junto con su homólogo de Comercio, Industria y Turismo, Sergio Díaz-Granados.
Holguín dijo que la Alianza avanza hacia "una integración profunda" que incluye, además del libre comercio, la apertura de oficinas comerciales o embajadas conjuntas, la libre movilidad de personas, el fortalecimiento de la educación y de las pequeñas y medianas empresas, entre otros factores.
La canciller anunció además que el abanico de países observadores de la Alianza seguirá ampliándose porque se han recibido solicitudes de incorporación de Turquía, Corea del Sur, China y Estados Unidos, lo que en su opinión demuestra el grado de interacción que el bloque latinoamericano va a tener con resto del mundo.
Si se aprueba su incorporación como observadores, estos países se sumarán a la docena de naciones de varias partes del mundo que actualmente tienen este estatus dentro de la Alianza, mecanismo que, según dijo a Efe el canciller mexicano, José Antonio Meade, "es una buena plataforma para mirar a Asia".
De los avances conseguidos el que más repercusión económica debe tener es el acuerdo de desgravación arancelaria que, según el ministro de Comercio de Colombia, se concluirá antes de que termine julio, tal como pidieron los presidentes en la cumbre de Cali.
"Hemos alcanzado un consenso de casi el 92% de los bienes y el resto lo haremos de manera gradual, con esto cumplimos el mandato de los presidentes de que antes de terminar el mes de julio hayamos concluido la negociación comercial", dijo Díaz-Granados.
El ministro explicó que la desgravación arancelaria del 8% que falta se negociará en una reunión de viceministros de los cuatro países miembros que se celebrará la próxima semana en Santiago de Chile.
"Antes del 30 de julio deberemos cerrar esa negociación y comunicarla a los miembros de la Alianza", reiteró.
Una vez se concluya esta negociación comercial se firmará el acuerdo sobre arancel cero, que será complementario del Acuerdo Marco que dio origen a la Alianza del Pacífico, cuyos países suman 210 millones de habitantes, equivalentes al 35% de América Latina y el Caribe, y representan el 33% del comercio de la región.
"Queda poco para que el capítulo de comercio se concretice. Ya hay un 92% de bienes acordados, un 4% adicional que ya está avanzado en el tiempo y otro 4% de (bienes de) alta sensibilidad sobre el cual dimos indicaciones para llegar a su conclusión en las próximas semanas", dijo a Efe el secretario de Economía de México, Ildefonso Guajardo Villareal,
La negociación arancelaria esta formada por 20 capítulos que tienen en cuenta el comercio de bienes y servicios, inversiones, compras gubernamentales, propiedad intelectual y solución de controversias, entre otros.
Guajardo explicó que la Alianza ha tomado el cuidado de incluir en sus negociaciones de reglas de origen un contenido regional mínimo "para mejorar las capacidades productivas de la región y que no sean otros países los que se beneficien de nuestros acuerdos".
El modelo de integración plateado por la Alianza del Pacífico no se restringe sólo al ámbito comercial sino que incluye otros considerados como "fundamentales" por los ministros, entre los que se cuentan migración y libre circulación de personas, mecanismos de promoción conjunta y cooperación.
Como parte de esa estrategia, los presidentes de los cuatro países participarán en septiembre próximo en un seminario para inversores que se celebrará en Nueva York con ocasión de la Asamblea General de la ONU para presentar los avances de la Alianza como "un gran mercado integrado", según el ministro Díaz-Granados.
--
Turquía, Corea del Sur, China y EE.UU. piden ser observadores en la Alianza del Pacífico
"Esto (el pedido de ingreso de nuevos observadores) demuestra lo que ha venido siendo la Alianza, demuestra cómo va a ser la interacción con América Latina, con (el bloque) Asia-Pacífico", manifestó la canciller colombiana.

Costa Rica fue admitido como miembro pleno en la cumbre presidencial celebrada en mayo y su proceso de adhesión debe estar concluido a fines de año.

Turquía, Corea del Sur, China y Estados Unidos pidieron su ingreso como observadores en la Alianza del Pacífico, el bloque formado por Chile, Colombia, México y Perú, informaron este domingo fuentes oficiales.
El anuncio lo hizo la canciller colombiana, María Ángela Holguín, al presentar en una rueda de prensa un balance de la VIII Reunión de Ministros de Relaciones Exteriores y de Comercio de la Alianza celebrada este sábado y domingo en la ciudad de Villa de Leyva, en el departamento de Boyacá, en el centro del país.

"Esto (el pedido de ingreso de nuevos observadores) demuestra lo que ha venido siendo la Alianza, demuestra cómo va a ser la interacción con América Latina, con (el bloque) Asia-Pacífico", manifestó la canciller colombiana.
La Alianza del Pacífico, mecanismo de integración constituido en junio de 2012 ha sumado ya como observadores a Australia, Canadá, España, Guatemala, Japón, Nueva Zelanda, Panamá, Uruguay, Ecuador, El Salvador, Francia, Honduras, Paraguay, Portugal y República Dominicana.
Costa Rica, que también fue país observador, fue admitido como miembro pleno en la cumbre presidencial celebrada en mayo pasado en la ciudad colombiana de Cali y su proceso de adhesión debe estar concluido a fines de año.
Según Holguín, en la Alianza del Pacífico "están representadas de una manera plural casi todas las regiones" y los cuatro países miembros tendrán que ver cómo se van a relacionar con todas ellas.
Al respecto, el canciller mexicano, José Antonio Meade, dijo a Efe que la Alianza, por su naturaleza plural, permite varios "espacios naturales de diálogo".

"Uno de ellos es entre los países miembros con los que generamos espacios de integración, con los Estados observadores, un grupo de características muy distintas con los que podemos tener un diálogo político y hablar de cooperación, y con aquellos que no son observadores que interesan a la Alianza", manifestó Meade.

Superavit Primario No More: fim de uma ficcao economica? - Editorial Estadao

Fez bem o Banco Central ao tentar reparar sua arranhada credibilidade econômica com o fim do uso desse conceito tão desacreditado quanto conspurcado pelo governo, de superávit primário. Ocorreram tantas manipulações nesses dados, que foi realmente necessário ao BC se distanciar de um conceito que, aparantemente, virou mais uma das heranças malditas do amadorismo econômico dos companheiros.
O mal já está feito, porém, e vamos ter de amargar maior inflação e menor crescimento pelos próximos meses.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

O BC se resguarda

01 de julho de 2013 | 2h 13
Editorial O Estado de S.Paulo
 
Para melhorar suas análises econômicas, o Banco Central (BC) deixará de utilizar em seus estudos o conceito de superávit primário no qual o governo baseia sua política fiscal.
Da forma como vem sendo calculado e apresentado, o superávit primário não permite avaliar com mais precisão os efeitos das ações do governo na área fiscal - como estímulos tributários ao consumo, a redução de impostos em alguns setores, o aumento ou a redução de gastos em determinadas áreas - sobre a atividade econômica e sobre os preços.
Por isso, o Banco Central passará a utilizar outro conceito, o de superávit estrutural, para projetar a evolução das variáveis econômicas e os efeitos das políticas econômicas.
Embora justificada numa nota de natureza técnica inserida no Relatório de Inflação - na qual expõe a mais recente atualização dos modelos que utiliza para simular cenários e efeitos das políticas econômicas, com o objetivo de subsidiar as decisões do Comitê de Política Monetária (Copom) -, a mudança promovida pelo Banco Central tem efeitos práticos que vão muito além da criação de balizas mais adequadas para a definição do nível dos juros básicos.
Ela constitui uma crítica à maneira como o governo vem conduzindo a política fiscal e anunciando seus resultados, falseados por manobras contábeis. E, ao deixar de utilizar os dados apresentados pelo Ministério da Fazenda e pela Secretaria do Tesouro Nacional, o BC afasta-se mais um pouco da gestão da política econômica do governo Dilma.
Vem fazendo isso há algum tempo de maneira discreta, para reconstruir as partes de sua credibilidade que foram corroídas quando se rendeu ao discurso ufanista do governo num momento em que já eram nítidos os sinais de deterioração do ambiente econômico.
O próprio Relatório de Inflação, divulgado na quinta-feira passada, mostra um BC com uma visão da realidade econômica diferente daquela que tem o ministro da Fazenda, Guido Mantega. Enquanto Mantega disse que a inflação está em queda - neste ano, poderá ser inferior à do ano passado -, o BC admite que ela poderá ser maior. Em março, o BC projetava inflação de 5,7% para este ano; agora, prevê 6%. Entre as fontes de pressão inflacionária, a instituição relacionou a "política fiscal expansionista" (isto é, gastos excessivos do governo), demanda forte demais em relação à oferta (mas o governo continua a estimular a demanda) e mercado de trabalho aquecido. Quanto ao desempenho da economia em 2013, o BC reviu para baixo sua projeção para o crescimento do PIB, de 3,1% para 2,7%.
A instituição, por compreensíveis motivos, não quer explicitar esse afastamento - que, destaque-se, é necessário para restabelecer não apenas sua credibilidade, mas também a de sua política, indispensável para, em sua esfera de influência, conter as pressões inflacionárias.
Em "nota de esclarecimento" divulgada na sexta-feira em resposta à reportagem do jornal Valor mostrando as mudanças técnicas, o BC diz que "a metodologia de apuração de resultados fiscais é universal, padronizada e estabelecida pelo Fundo Monetário Internacional", e que a sua utilização nos seus modelos de simulação e estudos econômicos "em nada afeta o conceito de resultado primário padronizado".
É tudo verdade. Mas não nega a troca da variável fiscal nos estudos da instituição. É, aliás, o que se lê no Relatório de Inflação. Segundo o BC, as atualizações nos modelos e nas variáveis que utiliza são necessárias "para manter o elevado nível de transparência das ações de política monetária" e, nas mudanças feitas agora com esse objetivo, "passou-se a utilizar o superávit primário estrutural como variável fiscal (...) em substituição ao superávit primário consolidado do setor público".
A diferença entre um conceito e outro é simples, mas essencial para tornar menos obscuros os resultados fiscais. O primeiro, diz a nota do BC, "é ajustado pelo ciclo econômico e exclui os efeitos de receitas e despesas extraordinárias". Já no cálculo do superávit primário, para cumprir a meta fixada na Lei de Diretrizes Orçamentárias, o governo tem lançado muitas receitas extraordinárias, obtidas por meio de artifícios contábeis, como a antecipação de dividendos de empresas estatais e outras manobras.

Albert Hirschman and the Hiding Hand - New Yorker

BOOKS

THE GIFT OF DOUBT

Albert O. Hirschman and the power of failure.

BY New Yorker, JUNE 24, 2013

Hirschman was a planner who saw virtue in the fact that nothing went as planned. Illustration by Ricardo Martinez.
Hirschman was a planner who saw virtue in the fact that nothing went as planned. Illustration by Ricardo Martinez.

In the mid-nineteenth century, work began on a crucial section of the railway line connecting Boston to the Hudson River. The addition would run from Greenfield, Massachusetts, to Troy, New York, and it required tunnelling through Hoosac Mountain, a massive impediment, nearly five miles thick, that blocked passage between the Deerfield Valley and a tributary of the Hudson.
James Hayward, one of New England’s leading railroad engineers, estimated that penetrating the Hoosac would cost, at most, a very manageable two million dollars. The president of Amherst College, an accomplished geologist, said that the mountain was composed of soft rock and that tunnelling would be fairly easy once the engineers had breached the surface. “The Hoosac . . . is believed to be the only barrier between Boston and the Pacific,” the project’s promoter, Alvah Crocker, declared.
Everyone was wrong. Digging through the Hoosac turned out to be a nightmare. The project cost more than ten times the budgeted estimate. If the people involved had known the true nature of the challenges they faced, they would never have funded the Troy-Greenfield railroad. But, had they not, the factories of northwestern Massachusetts wouldn’t have been able to ship their goods so easily to the expanding West, the cost of freight would have remained stubbornly high, and the state of Massachusetts would have been immeasurably poorer. So is ignorance an impediment to progress or a precondition for it?
The economist Albert O. Hirschman, who died last December, loved paradoxes like this. He was a “planner,” the kind of economist who conceives of grand infrastructure projects and bold schemes. But his eye was drawn to the many ways in which plans did not turn out the way they were supposed to—to unintended consequences and perverse outcomes and the puzzling fact that the shortest line between two points is often a dead end.
“The Principle of the Hiding Hand,” one of Hirschman’s many memorable essays, drew on an account of the Troy-Greenfield “folly,” and then presented an even more elaborate series of paradoxes. Hirschman had studied the enormous Karnaphuli Paper Mills, in what was then East Pakistan. The mill was built to exploit the vast bamboo forests of the Chittagong Hill Tracts. But not long after the mill came online the bamboo unexpectedly flowered and then died, a phenomenon now known to recur every fifty years or so. Dead bamboo was useless for pulping; it fell apart as it was floated down the river. Because of ignorance and bad planning, a new, multimillion-dollar industrial plant was suddenly without the raw material it needed to function.
But what impressed Hirschman was the response to the crisis. The mill’s operators quickly found ways to bring in bamboo from villages throughout East Pakistan, building a new supply chain using the country’s many waterways. They started a research program to find faster-growing species of bamboo to replace the dead forests, and planted an experimental tract. They found other kinds of lumber that worked just as well. The result was that the plant was blessed with a far more diversified base of raw materials than had ever been imagined. If bad planning hadn’t led to the crisis at the Karnaphuli plant, the mill’s operators would never have been forced to be creative. And the plant would not have been nearly as valuable as it became.
“We may be dealing here with a general principle of action,” Hirschman wrote:

Creativity always comes as a surprise to us; therefore we can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened. In other words, we would not consciously engage upon tasks whose success clearly requires that creativity be forthcoming. Hence, the only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity than it will turn out to be.

And from there Hirschman’s analysis took flight. People don’t seek out challenges, he went on. They are “apt to take on and plunge into new tasks because of the erroneously presumed absence of a challenge—because the task looks easier and more manageable than it will turn out to be.” This was the Hiding Hand principle—a play on Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand. The entrepreneur takes risks but does not see himself as a risk-taker, because he operates under the useful delusion that what he’s attempting is not risky. Then, trapped in mid-mountain, people discover the truth—and, because it is too late to turn back, they’re forced to finish the job.
“We have ended up here with an economic argument strikingly paralleling Christianity’s oft expressed preference for the repentant sinner over the righteous man who never strays from the path,” Hirschman wrote in this essay from 1967. Success grew from failure:

And essentially the same idea, even though formulated, as one might expect, in a vastly different spirit, is found in Nietzsche’s famous maxim, “That which does not destroy me, makes me stronger.” This sentence admirably epitomizes several of the histories of economic development projects in recent decades.

As was nearly always the case with Hirschman’s writing, he made his argument without mathematical formulas or complex models. His subject was economics, but his spirit was literary. He drew on Brecht, Kafka, Freud, Flaubert, La Rochefoucauld, Montesquieu, Montaigne, and Machiavelli, not to mention Homer—he had committed huge sections of the Odyssey to memory. The pleasure of reading Hirschman comes not only from the originality of his conclusions but also from the delightfully idiosyncratic path he took to them. Consider this, from the same essay (and, remember, this is an economist who’s writing):

While we are rather willing and even eager and relieved to agree with a historian’s finding that we stumbled into the more shameful events of history, such as war, we are correspondingly unwilling to concede—in fact we find it intolerable to imagine—that our more lofty achievements, such as economic, social or political progress, could have come about by stumbling rather than through careful planning. . . . Language itself conspires toward this sort of asymmetry: we fall into error, but do not usually speak of falling into truth.

“Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman” (Princeton), by the Princeton historian Jeremy Adelman, is a biography worthy of the man. Adelman brilliantly and beautifully brings Hirschman to life, giving us an unforgettable portrait of one of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary intellectuals.
Hirschman was born in Berlin in 1915, into a prosperous family of Jewish origin. His father was a surgeon, and the family lived in the embassy district, near the Tiergarten. Hirschman was slender and handsome, in the mold of Albert Camus. He dressed elegantly, danced skillfully, spoke half a dozen languages, and had a special affection for palindromes. He was absent-minded and distractable. While lecturing, Adelman writes, “He rambled. He mumbled. Mid-sentence, he would pause, his right hand supporting his chin, his eyes drifting upward to fasten on a spot on the ceiling.” He would call his wife upon taking his car somewhere because—as he once said—“I do not know how to put it among two other cars on the sidewalk.” “When you spoke to him,” a friend said, “it was sometimes five or ten seconds before he would show any sign of having heard you.” He was also deeply charming when he put his mind to it.
The great influence on Hirschman’s life was his brother-in-law, the Italian intellectual Eugenio Colorni. Colorni and Hirschman were as close as siblings, and when Colorni was killed by Fascist thugs in Rome, during the Second World War, Hirschman was inconsolable. Adelman writes:

Colorni believed that doubt was creative because it allowed for alternative ways to see the world, and seeing alternatives could steer people out of intractable circles and self-feeding despondency. Doubt, in fact, could motivate: freedom from ideological constraints opened up political strategies, and accepting the limits of what one could know liberated agents from their dependence on the belief that one had to know everything before acting, that conviction was a precondition for action.

The phrase that Hirschman and Colorni would repeat to each other was that they hoped to “prove Hamlet wrong.” Hamlet shouldn’t have been frozen by his doubts; he should have been freed by them. Hamlet took himself too seriously. He thought he needed to be perfect. Colorni and Hirschman didn’t. Courage, Colorni wrote, required the willingness “to always be on guard against oneself.”
Doubt didn’t mean disengagement. In the summer of 1936, Hirschman volunteered to fight in Spain on the side of the Loyalists, against General Franco’s German-backed Fascists. He was twenty-one and living in Paris, having just got back from studying at the London School of Economics. He was among the first wave of German and Italian volunteers to take the train to Barcelona. “When I heard that there was even a possibility to do something,” Hirschman said, “I went.”
Hirschman rarely spoke about what happened in Spain. Decades later, Adelman recounts, Albert and his wife, Sarah, went to see a film about the Spanish Civil War. Afterward, Sarah asked Albert, “Was it like that?” His response was a deft non-response: “Yeah, that was a pretty good film.” On this subject, as on a few others, Sarah felt a certain reticence in her husband. Still, as Adelman remarks, “the scars on his neck and leg made it impossible for her to forget.”
Adelman interprets Hirschman’s silence as disenchantment: “The endless debate rehearsed in Berlin and Paris over left-wing tactics was more than a farce, it was a tragedy of epic proportions.” Hirschman saw the Communists move in and, in his mind, the spirit of the cause became contaminated. It broke his heart. But Hirschman would come to recognize that action fuelled by doubt allows for failures to be left behind. Spain was a tragedy, but it was also, for him, an experiment, and experiments go awry.
Hirschman liked to say that he had “a propensity to self-subversion.” He even gave one of his books that title. He qualified and questioned and hedged as a matter of habit. He never trusted himself enough to indulge in grand theorizing. He pursued the “petite idée,” the attempt, as he said, “to come to an understanding of reality in portions, admitting that the angle may be subjective.” Once, when a World Bank director sent him a paper that referred to the “Hirschman Doctrine,” Hirschman replied, “Unfortunately (or, I rather tend to think, fortunately), there is no Hirschman school of economic development and I cannot point to a large pool of disciples where one might fish out someone to work with you along those lines.”
Hirschman spent his career in constant motion. After doing graduate training in London and Italy, fighting in Spain, and spending the first part of the war in France, he left for the United States, by which point he had begun to lose track of his own movements. “This makes my fourth—or is it fifth?—emigration,” he wrote to his mother. He accepted a fellowship at Berkeley (where he met the woman he would marry, Sarah Chapiro, another émigré), did a tour of duty for the O.S.S. in North Africa and Europe, and, with the war concluded, served a stint at the Federal Reserve Board, where he grew so unhappy that he would return home to his wife and two daughters in Chevy Chase, shut the door to his study, and bury himself in Kafka. He worked for the Marshall Plan in Washington, providing, Adelman says, “the thinking behind the thinking,” only to be turned down for a transfer to Paris because of a failed national-security review. He was in his mid-thirties. On a whim, he packed up the family and moved to Bogotá, Colombia, where he worked on a project for the World Bank. He crisscrossed the country with, Adelman writes, “pen in hand and paper handy, examining irrigation projects, talking to local bankers about their farm loans, and scribbling calculations about the costs of road building.”
Writing to her parents about the family’s decision to move to Colombia, which was then in the midst of a civil war, Sarah explained, “We both realize that you should think of the future—make plans for the children etc. But I think we both somehow feel that it is impossible to know what is best and that the present is so much more important—because if the present is solid and good it will be a surer basis for a good future than any plans that you can make.” Most people would not have left a home in Chevy Chase and the security of a job in Washington to go to a Third World country where armed gangsters roamed the streets, because they would feel certain that Colombia was a mistake. Hirschman believed, as a matter of principle, that it was impossible to know whether Colombia would be a mistake. As it happened, the four years the family spent in Bogotá were among its happiest. Hirschman returned to Latin America again and again during his career, and what he learned there provided the raw material for his most brilliant work. His doubt was a gift, not a curse.
Hirschman published his first important book, “The Strategy of Economic Development,” in 1958. He had returned from Colombia by then and was at Yale, and the book was an attempt to make sense of his experience of watching a country try to lift itself out of poverty. At the time, he was reading deeply in the literature of psychology and psychoanalysis, and he became fascinated with the functional uses of negative emotions: frustration, aggression, and, in particular, anxiety. Obstacles led to frustration, and frustration to anxiety. No one wanted to be anxious. But wasn’t anxiety the most powerful motivator—the emotion capable of driving even the most reluctant party toward some kind of solution?
In the field of developmental economics, this was heretical. When people from organizations like the World Bank descended on Third World countries, they always tried to remove obstacles to development, to reduce economic anxiety and uncertainty. They wanted to build bridges and roads and airports and dams to insure that businesses and entrepreneurs encountered as few impediments as possible to growth. But, as Hirschman thought about case studies like the Karnaphuli Paper Mills and the Troy-Greenfield folly, he became convinced that his profession had it backward. His profession ought to embrace anxiety, and not seek to remove it.
As he wrote in a follow-up essay to “The Strategy of Economic Development”:

Law and order and the absence of civil strife seem to be obvious preconditions for the gradual and patient accumulation of skills, capital and investors’ confidence that must be the foundation for economic progress. We are now told, however, that the presence of war-like Indians in North America and the permanent conflict between them and the Anglo-Saxon settlers was a great advantage, because it made necessary methodical, well-planned, and gradual advances toward an interior which always remained in close logistic and cultural contact with the established communities to the East. In Brazil, on the contrary, the backlands were open and virtually uncontested; the result was that once an excessively vast area had been occupied in an incredibly brief time span the pioneers became isolated and regressed economically and culturally.

The impulse of the developmental economist in those days would have been to remove the “impediments” to growth—to swoop in and have some powerful third party deal with the “war-like Indians.” But that would have turned North America into Brazil, and the pioneers would never have been forced to develop methodical, well-planned advances in logistical contact with the East.
Developing countries required more than capital. They needed practice in making difficult economic decisions. Economic progress was the product of successful habits—and there is no better teacher, Hirschman felt, than a little adversity. He would rather encourage settlers and entrepreneurs at the grass-roots level—and make them learn how to cope with those impediments themselves—than run the risk that aid might infantilize its recipient. He loved to tell the story of how, at a dinner party in a Latin American country, he struggled to track down the telephone number of a fellow-academic: “I asked whether there might be a chance that X would be listed in the telephone directory; this suggestion was shrugged off with the remark that the directory makes a point of listing only people who have either emigrated or died. . . . The economist said that X must be both much in demand and hard to reach, as several people had inquired about how to get in touch with him within the past few days. The subject was dropped as hopeless, and everybody spent a pleasant evening.”
Back in his hotel room, Hirschman looked in the phone book, found his friend’s number, and got him on the line immediately.
A few years after publishing “The Strategy of Economic Development,” Hirschman was invited by the World Bank to conduct a survey of some of its projects. He drew up his own itinerary, which, typically, involved almost an entire circuit of the globe: a power plant in El Salvador, roads in Ecuador, an irrigation project in Peru, pasture improvement in Uruguay, telecommunication in Ethiopia, power transmission in Uganda, an irrigation project in Sudan, railway modernization in Nigeria, the Damodar Valley Corporation in India, the Karnaphuli Paper Mills, an irrigation project in Thailand and another in the south of Italy.
Adelman is struck by the tone of optimism in Hirschman’s notes on his journey. The economist was interested in all the ways in which projects managed to succeed, both in spite of and because of the difficulties:

Instead of asking: what benefits [has] this project yielded, it would almost be more pertinent to ask: how many conflicts has it brought in its wake? How many crises has it occasioned and passed through? And these conflicts and crises should appear both on the benefit and the cost side, or sometimes on one—sometimes on the other, depending on the outcome (which cannot be known with precision for a long time, if ever).

Only Hirschman would circle the globe and be content to conclude that he couldn’t reach a conclusion—for a long time, if ever. He was a planner who really didn’t believe in planning. He wanted to remind other economists that a lot of the problems they tried to fix were either better off not being fixed or weren’t problems to begin with.
Late in life, Hirschman underwent surgery in Germany. When he emerged from anesthesia, he asked his surgeon, “Why are bananas bent?” The doctor shrugged. Hirschman, even then, could not resist a poke at his fellow economic planners: “Because nobody went to the jungle to adjust it and make it straight.”
While fighting for France during the Second World War, Hirschman persuaded his commander to give him false French papers and he became Albert Hermant. After the country fell to the Germans, Hirschman ended up in Marseilles, along with thousands of other refugees. There he learned that an American named Varian Fry was coming to France as part of the Emergency Rescue Committee—an American group that sought to get as many Jewish refugees out of France as possible. Hirschman met Fry at the train station and took him back to the Hotel Splendide. They hit it off instantly.
Fry had access to U.S. visas. But he needed Hirschman’s help in figuring out escape routes into Spain, procuring false passports and identity papers, and smuggling in money to fund the operation. Hirschman was invaluable. He spoke Italian like an Italian and German like a German and French like a Frenchman, and had so many fake documents—including a card attesting to membership in the “Club for People Without Clubs”—that Fry joked he was “like a criminal who has too many alibis.” Fry nicknamed him Beamish, on account of his irrepressible charm. Beginning in 1940, the Emergency Rescue Committee helped save thousands of people from the clutches of Fascism, among them Hannah Arendt, André Breton, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Alma Mahler.
Hirschman was as reluctant to talk about his time in Marseilles as he was to talk about the battles he fought in the Spanish Civil War. As a fellow at Berkeley, in the early forties, he was placed in the International House, and the other graduate students urged him to speak about what had happened to him in Europe. “The newcomer sat there,” Adelman writes, “with his handkerchief twisted in his fingers, nervously waiting for the calls to pass.” Hirschman moved out of the International House as soon as he could. “I couldn’t stand being considered as sort of a wonder of the world or something like that,” he later recalled. “I just wanted to be myself.”
The closest Hirschman ever came to explaining his motives was in his most famous work, “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty,” and even then it was only by implication. Hirschman was interested in contrasting the two strategies that people have for dealing with badly performing organizations and institutions. “Exit” is voting with your feet, expressing your displeasure by taking your business elsewhere. “Voice” is staying put and speaking up, choosing to fight for reform from within. There is no denying where his heart lay.
Early in the book, Hirschman quoted the conservative economist Milton Friedman, who argued that school vouchers should replace the current public-school system. “Parents could express their views about schools directly, by withdrawing their children from one school and sending them to another, to a much greater extent than is now possible,” Friedman wrote. “In general they can now take this step only by changing their place of residence. For the rest, they can express their views only through cumbrous political channels.”
This was, Hirschman wrote, a “near perfect example of the economist’s bias in favor of exit and against voice”:

In the first place, Friedman considers withdrawal or exit as the “direct” way of expressing one’s unfavorable views of an organization. A person less well trained in economics might naively suggest that the direct way of expressing views is to express them! Secondly, the decision to voice one’s views and efforts to make them prevail are contemptuously referred to by Friedman as a resort to “cumbrous political channels.” But what else is the political, and indeed the democratic, process than the digging, the use, and hopefully the slow improvement of these very channels?

Hirschman pointed out the ways in which “exit” failed to send a useful message to underperformers. Weren’t there cases where monopolists were relieved when their critics left? “Those who hold power in the lazy monopoly may actually have an interest in creating some limited opportunities for exit on the part of those whose voice might be uncomfortable,” he wrote. The worst thing that ever happened to incompetent public-school districts was the growth of private schools: they siphoned off the kind of parents who would otherwise have agitated more strongly for reform.
Beneath Hirschman’s elegant sentences, you can hear a deeper argument. Exit ispassive. It is silent protest. And silent protest, for him, is too easy. “Proving Hamlet wrong” was about the importance of acting in the face of doubt—but also of acting in the face of fear. Voice was courage. He went to fight Fascism in Spain. It ended in failure. When the Nazis came hunting for the Jews, he tried again. “Expanding the operation meant, increasingly, that Beamish’s work was in the streets, bars, and brothels of Marseilles, expanding the tentacles of the operation,” Adelman writes. “If the operation had a fixer, it was Beamish. It was a role he relished.”
Beamish screened the refugees, weeding out potential informers. He cajoled first the Czech, then the Polish, and, finally, the Lithuanian consuls into providing fake passports. He made deals with Marseilles mobsters and a shadowy Russian émigré to get money into France. He held secret meetings in brothels. Several times, he was nearly caught, but he charmed his way out of trouble.
When the authorities finally caught onto Hirschman, he escaped across the Pyrenees to Spain on foot, equipped with false Lithuanian papers. On the ship to America, he played Ping-Pong and chess, and romanced a young Czech woman. As Adelman’s magnificent biography makes plain, it was hard not to fall for Albert Hirschman. A colleague from his Marseilles days remembered him, years later, as “a handsome fellow with rather soulful eyes . . . taking everything in, his head cocked slightly to one side. One of those German intellectuals, I thought, always trying to figure everything out.” 

Plano Real: 19 anos; inflacao acumulada: 332.33pc (mas podia ser maior)

A trajetória do Real é sem dúvida alguma um sucesso, mas apenas no contexto da economia brasileira do último meio século, quando seis moedas se sucederam em curtos intervalos.
Pessoas, movimentos e partidos se posicionaram contra o plano e contra vários de seus mecanismos, como a Lei de Responsabilidade Fiscal. Teve gente que chegou a acusar o plano real de "estelionato eleitoral", numa enorme demonstração de má-fé e de torcer pelo quanto pior melhor (para certos movimentos).
Felizmente, ele se sustentou, mas voltamos a enfrentar os mesmos problemas que existiam nos anos 1980: pressão sobre os preços de bens correntes e demandas repetidas por aumentos salariais, o que transformaria o Brasil novamente no país da inflação.
Esperamos que não seja preciso voltar atrás.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Plano Real faz 19 anos com tomate 1.716% mais caro

Preço das tarifas de ônibus urbano foi outro grande vilão, com alta de 684%; em São Paulo, valor subiu de R$ 0,50 em 1994 para R$ 3 atualmente 


30 de junho de 2013 | 22h 58
Alana Martins e Juliana Karpinski, especial para o Estado
SÃO PAULO - Famoso por ter conquistado a tão sonhada estabilização da economia brasileira, o Plano Real completa 19 anos nesta segunda-feira, dia 1. Criado em 1994 pela equipe do então ministro da Fazenda, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, durante o governo Itamar Franco, a nova moeda conseguiu o que vários outros planos econômicos não alcançaram: debelar a hiperinflação.
Segundo o economista da Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV), Leonardo Weller, especialista em História Econômica, o êxito do Real se deve a três questões principais: liberalização comercial, câmbio estável e desindexação.
A liberalização comercial foi basicamente uma grande abertura do país ao capital estrangeiro. A medida veio acompanhada de uma taxa de câmbio estável, aumentou a concorrência aos produtos brasileiros e pressionou os preços para baixo.
Já a desindexação da economia consistiu em reduzir mecanismos de repasse automático da inflação, como os gatilhos salariais, que não permitiam que os preços se estabilizassem.
A inflação chegou a 916,46% no ano de 1994 e foi estabilizada em níveis baixos nos anos seguintes, mas não deixou de existir.
Entre 1994 e 2013, a taxa acumulada, segundo o Índice de Preços ao Consumidor Amplo (IPCA), foi de 332,33%. Alguns produtos, como o tomate, que se causou polêmica nas listas de compras no início deste ano, está no topo da lista dos produtos que mais subiram de preço: segundo o IBGE, o aumento acumulado é de 1.716,2% nos últimos 19 anos.
O preço das tarifas de ônibus urbano foi outro grande vilão, com alta de 684%. Em São Paulo, a tarifa subiu de R$ 0,50 em 1994 para R$ 3 atualmente.
Nem um dos componentes principais da dieta dos brasileiros subiu menos que a inflação. O feijão-carioca teve variação de 785,9% desde a criação do plano Real. Neste período, o salário mínimo subiu de R$ 64,79 para R$ 678, uma elevação de 1046,45%. Para Weller, mesmo com as recentes altas da inflação, o país não corre mais o risco de passar por uma nova hiperinflação. Isso porque a economia do País está mais inserida no conceito de economia de mercado.
Entretanto, o economista assinala que os protestos que têm tomado ruas recentemente são o primeiro sintoma de perda da "ilusão monetária".
"As pessoas perceberam que o ganho do salário nominal (sem descontar a inflação) nos últimos anos está sendo corroído pela inflação. Houve uma queda no salário real. E isso foi percebido rapidamente", afirma.