In 1988, Brazilian Constitution definedhealth as a universal right and state responsibility. Progress towards universal health coverage (UHC) has been achieved through a Unified Health System (Sistema Único de Saúde, SUS) which was created in 1990. With successes and setbacks in the implementation of health programmes and organization of its health system, Brazil has achieved nearly-universal access to health services for her citizens. The trajectory of the development and expansion of the SUS offers valuable lessons on how to scale UHC in a health system in a highly-unequal country and relatively low resources. The analysis of the 30 years since the inception of SUS shows that innovations in the Brazilian health system extend beyond the development of new models of care and highlights the importance of establishing political, legal, organizational and management-related structures, and the role of the federal and local governments in the governance, planning, financing, and provision of health services. The expansion of SUS has allowed Brazil to rapidly address the changing health needs, with dramatic scaling up health service coverage in just three decades. However, despite its successes, analysis of future scenarios suggests the urgent need to address lingering geographic inequalities, insufficient funding, and the suboptimal private-public collaboration. Recent fiscal policies that ushered austerity measures, environmental, educational and health policies of the new administraion introduced in Brazil could reverse the hard-earned achievements of the SUS and threaten its sustainability and its ability to fulfil its constitutional mandate of providing 'health for all'. 2000 2010 2015 Births attended by skilled health staff (% of total) 87•6 98•6 98•9 99•1 Immunization, BCG (% of one-year-old children) 79 99 99 99 Immunization, measles (% of children ages 12-23 months) 78 99 99 96 Immunization, DPT (% of children ages 12-23 months) 66 98 99 96 Immunization, Hib3 (% of children ages 12-23 months) 90 99 96 Immunization, Pol3 (% of one-year-old children) 58 99 99 98 Immunization, HepB3 (% of one-year-old children) 94 96 96 Antiretroviral therapy coverage (% people living with HIV) 27 38 57

Reelection, Brazilian municipalities, Panel data econometrics, H72, C23, C25,

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Abstract From 1988 to 1995, when trade liberalization was implemented in Brazil, relative earnings of skilled workers decreased. In this paper, we investigate the role of trade liberalization in explaining these relative earnings movements, by checking all the steps predicted by the HeckscherOhlin-style trade transmission mechanism. We find that: i) employment shifted from skilled to unskilled intensive sectors, and each sector increased its relative share of skilled labor; ii) relative prices fell in skill intensive sectors; iii) tariff changes across sectors were not related to skill intensities, but the pass-through from tariffs to prices was stronger in skill intensive sectors; iv) the decline in skilled earnings differentials mandated by the price variation predicted by trade is very close to the observed one. The results are compatible with trade liberalization, accounting for the observed relative earnings changes in Brazil. Terms of use: Documents in

Political cycles, Brazilian municipalities, Panel data, C23, H72,

Unions and Innovation: A Survey of the Theory and Empirical Evidence* This Paper surveys the economic literature on the impact of trade unions on innovation. There are many theoretical routes through which unions may have an effect on innovation, for example through their effects on relative factor prices, profitability and their attitudes towards the introduction of new technology. Recent theoretical work has focused on the possibility that trade unions will 'hold up' firms by expropriating sunk R&D (research and development) investments through demanding higher rewards. The hold up problem may be mitigated (or exacerbated) by strategic incentives to compete in R&D races. In an attempt to resolve the theoretical ambiguity we focus on surveying recent micro-econometric results in the areas of R&D, innovation, technological diffusion and productivity growth. North American results find consistently strong and negative impacts of unions on R&D. By contrast, European studies (mainly in the UK) generally do not uncover negative effects of unions on R&D. There is no consensus of the effects of unions on our other main measures: technological diffusion, innovation or productivity growth even in the North American studies. These cross-country differences in the R&D impact of unions could represent either unsolved econometric problems or genuine institutional differences between nations in union attitudes and ability to bargain. We suspect the latter is the main reason.JEL Classification: J51, O31 and O32

This paper uses a unique new data set on manufacturing firms in Brazil and India to estimate production functions, augmented by information and communications technology (ICT). We find a strong positive association between ICT capital and productivity in both countries that is robust to several different specification tests. The paper also breaks new ground when using the Indian data to investigate the effect of the institutional and policy environment on ICT capital investment and productivity. We find that poorer infrastructure quality and labor market policy are associated with lower levels of ICT adoption, while poorer infrastructure is also associated with lower returns to investment. © 2011 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

We employ comprehensive linked employer-employee data for Brazil to analyze wage determinants and compare results to Abowd et al. (2001) for French and U.S. manufacturing. While returns to human capital in Brazilian manufacturing exceed those of the other countries, occupation and gender differentials are similar. The worker-characteristics component accounts for much of the greater wage inequality in Brazil, but the establishment-fixed component has scant explanatory power. Thus, firm- or industry-level factors offer little scope for explaining the differences in wage inequality. Brazil's wage structure resembles that of France, a country with some similarity in labor market institutions. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

U.S. research has found that unionization adversely affects research and development investment, consistent with the view that labor unions' rent-seeking activities act as a tax on innovation.In this U.K. study, preliminary analysis of two datasets (a cross-section of plants and a company panel for the years 1983-90) shows the same negative correlation. This correlation completely disappears, however, when controls are included for such factors as cohort effects and the availability of innovative technology in the industry. Moreover, R&D intensity appears to have been higher in enterprises where there were low levels of union density than in those where there was no union presence. Some evidence suggests that the difference between U.K and U.S. results may be due to cross-country differences in the prioritization of non-pay issues in bargaining. T he strongest body of evidence thatunionism may harm economic growth lies in the analysis of the relation between unionism and spending on R&D (Freeman 1992). The relatively low growth rates of the U.K. economy have frequently been attributed to the poor state of industrial relations in Britain and, in particular, to the power of the trade unions (for example, Crafts 1988). Addison and Hirsch (1989) argued that the truly damaging effects of , and participants in seminars in Birkbeck, EEA, LSE, RES Conference, UCL, and Warwick provided several helpful comments.labor unions are not so much on static efficiency (productivity levels) but on dynamic efficiency (productivity growth). By retarding investment, unions reduce corporate growth rates. This reasoning follows from a rent-sharing view of how unions operate. If unions raise wages by extracting economic rents from the firm and if some of these quasi-rents flow from past sunk investments in different forms of capital, companies will be discouraged from investing.Later writers have amplified this point and claimed that long-term and uncertain investments are particularly likely to be affected by union rent-extraction. Grout (1984) detailed a model in which unions bargain over employment and wages conditional on investment. The perfect equilibrium of this two-stage game results in lower investment than would occur in the absence of bargaining. Baldwin (1983) argued that unions will generally have a