Capital productivity evolution
relative to labor is analyzed in six countries aiming at understanding the causes of
stagnation –already for a quarter of a century – of the Brazilian GDP per inhabitant. The
capital productivity has been falling in the last years without the corresponding increase of
labor productivity – or of its proxy the per capita income. It seems (surprisingly) thatcapital and labor productivity
behavior in Italy,
Japan and Korea could
be described by the simple Cobb-Douglas function (or Solow model with zero technology growth). The other analyzed countries (Chile, India and Brazil)
follow very different paths but, while the two first countries seem to have found the way to
growth and reducing the capital productivity loses, Brazil is not successful in increasing its
GDP/inhabitant.
The application of the
simplified methodology for evaluating the capital productivity makes it possible the analysis
of this parameters in countries for which more complete data are not available. The
reliability of the simplified method application is discussed and it is then applied to six
countries where the capital productivity variation was important in the last decades.
Independence of opinion is a
principle among the e&emembers, announced since
our number zero issue and cultivated in more than seven years of the publication. The public
debate involving the IAEA nuclear inspections in the Resende enrichment plant has as main
participants two of the e&emembers, the Vice-Admiral
Othon Pinheiro da Silva and Professor José Goldemberg. Nuclear energy is a subject relevant
for the Brazilian energy and technological future that involves strategic aspects that should
be examined with attention.
The adoption of a technology
called jet-nozzle in the frame of the Nuclear Agreement with Germany, considered by many as
economically non viable, has conducted the Vice-Admiral Othon Pinheiro da Silva, author of the
present article, to propose an independent enrichment line using ultracentrifuges. In four
years the first enrichment operation was carried out with centrifuges totally planned,
designed and fabricated in Brazil. A little of the history of the process and the posterior
application of ABACC and IAEA safeguards to the process is narrated by the author, including
the use of the “French public pissoir” for protecting the technology. The consequences that
new menaces of using nuclear artifacts against countries without nuclear weapons could bring
to nuclear proliferations are also commented.
In 2005 an international
conference – that takes place every five years – will review the success and failures of the
NPT. Brazil participates in a group of seven countries that organized a “New Agenda Coalition”
in which our present Foreign Minister Celso Amorim was very active and endorsed the point of
view that the control of nuclear weapons access by countries that do not possess them should
be linked to disarmament of those countries that possess them, which would make the world less
dangerous than it is now.
No
4
