Capital Account Regulation and National Autonomy: The Political Economy of the New Welfare Economics

The 2007-2009 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) eroded the consensus around the benefits of capital mobility within mainstream economics. Against this background, this paper discusses to what extent the new mainstream position on capital flow management measures, based on the New Welfare Economics, expands the policy space of developing and emerging economies (DEEs). This paper argues that the new position can be classified as an embedded neoliberal one, given that it keeps liberalization as its ultimate goal, while nonetheless accepting to mitigate some of its harmful consequences. After comparing the capital account policies of China and Brazil, this paper concludes that the policy prescriptions of the New Welfare Economics do not lead to higher levels of national autonomy for DEEs and are likewise unable to curb financial instability in these countries.

Capital account regulation as part of the macroeconomic regime: comparing Brazil in the 1990s and 2000s

Capital account regulation (CAR) has experienced profound reconsideration since the global financial crisis. This new debate focuses on the macroeconomic gains of regulating international capital flows in terms of reducing external and financial vulnerability, but it does not consider relevant aspects relating to the context in which these regulations are implemented. In this paper, we undertake a comparative analysis of similar types of CAR applied in Brazil during the 1990s and 2000s. Based on this analysis, we conclude that for the design of CAR, which is relevant for its effectiveness, institutional features of both the financial market and the macroeconomic regime, shaped by macroeconomic constraints, are relevant. For the case of Brazil, we conclude that, contrary to the 2000s, the strong preference given to inflation stabilization in the 1990s, together with high external vulnerability, strongly limited the CAR's design of this period.

Capital account regulation in Brazil: An assessment of the 2009-2013 period

ABSTRACT Brazil was one of the emerging countries that had a stronger trend of currency appreciation from the 2nd quarter of 2009 to July 2011. Under this context that can be understood the implementation of capital account regulation (CAR) after 2009, which was complemented with another kind of regulation, the so-called FX Derivatives Regulation (FXDR). This paper shows that only when Brazilian government adopted these two kinds of regulations simultaneously, the policy effectiveness increased in terms of protecting the Brazilian currency from upward pressures. Brazilian experience also highlights that it is not possible to establish a hierarchy between temporary instruments to manage capital flows and permanent prudential measures, as supported by the IMF current approach.

Methodology of parking analysis

Cities are facing many challenges, in particular in relation to the mobility of people and the structure of land use. Parking management, which makes the link between land use and transportation, is one of the crucial ways to meet these challenges. In the Greater Montreal Area, data from origin–destination (OD) surveys is helpful in understanding typical travel behaviour. This study processes car driver trips from travel surveys to develop vehicle accumulation profiles and derive theoretical parking supplies from the observed parking demand, defined as the maximal number of cars parked in an area at a given time. This research also provides an assessment of the quality of the estimation by comparing the parking supplies derived from an OD survey to parking supplies estimated from public geographical information systems and field surveys. The paper shows that parking supply is subject to high variability and highlights that its assessment must take into account regulation data (obtained from on-street regulation parking signs data) that modulates the availability of the raw parking supply according to different days and hours of the day.