Brazil

The Executive Directors approved the Brazil - Third Minas Gerais Development Partnership Development Policy Loan, or DPL Project to the State of Minas Gerais, Brazil... Show More + in the amount of US$450 million on the payment terms and conditions set out in the President's memorandum. Directors expressed broad support for the Development Policy Loan, which is aligned with and closely linked to the objectives of the Brazil Country Partnership Strategy, or CPS, 2012-2015. Directors highlighted the importance of closely monitoring program results and the State's fiscal situation, given its high vulnerability to reductions in commodity prices. Staffs were urged to ensure that the operation will benefit the poorest regions of the State and foster more jobs for youth. Directors also called for dissemination of the lessons learned from its successful reform to other client governments, both inside and outside Brazil. Directors noted staff efforts to provide support to Brazil through a large number of sub-national DPLs, and in this regard called for an assessment of lessons learned. Directors also noted efforts to support improvements in environmental management and climate change mitigation policies. Show Less -

The present study focuses on gender while analyzing the effects of the Rural Poverty Reduction Project (RPRP) on the use of time and income generation as well as on... Show More + cultural and social capital aspects. The study was based on a pilot project in Rio Grande do Norte designed to reinforce actions of the RPRP's focus on gender. The study should be viewed only as an exploratory evaluation that can be indicative of project effects, since the sample used was small and the time span between the subproject's implementation and the collection of impact data was short (only one year). However, other measures in the methodology guarantee a satisfactory minimum level of rigorousness in the evaluation, such as the comparison to a control group taken from a pipeline population of potential beneficiaries and a before-and-after approach to the analysis. The integration of gender concerns into World Bank poverty-reducing programs has been implemented by promoting inclusive development, ensuring that both women and men have a voice in the development of their community and benefit from new development opportunities. Part of this strategy is to advance women's economic empowerment by enhancing their ability to participate in land, labor, financial, and product markets. The current study was conducted simultaneously with the pilot project in order to document its results and, when possible, draw lessons that could be helpful in new operations. The study estimates, on a preliminary basis, how community investments that save women's time in household activities by themselves or combined with investments in production create the enabling environment for women's economic empowerment and, eventually, help reduce poverty. Show Less -

The book analyzes the success of Brazil's public debt management practices. Over the past 10 years, Brazil has strengthened these practices so impressively that in early... Show More + 2008, with the threat of a strong financial crisis in the world ahead, the main rating agencies assigned Brazil the investment grade. Despite the serious financial crisis that actually erupted in 2008, Brazil's credibility with domestic and international investors remains high. This book is organized into three parts: Part I, Understanding the Brazilian Public Debt; Origin and history of Brazil's public debt up to 1963, provides an historical and conceptual analysis of Brazil's public debt, exploring its main concepts and sustainability, and offering a view of its progress from its inception to the present. Part II, Managing the Brazilian Public Debt, describes all aspects of FPD management. Part III, The Public Debt Market in Brazil, describes how the public debt market operates in Brazil. It reviews recent developments and follows with the characteristics of public securities traditionally used to finance debt, along with their pricing schemes. Next, it describes the organization of Brazil's financial markets, the operation of primary and secondary debt markets, the expansion of the investor base over time and the main holders of government securities. Show Less -

This book combines a comprehensive overview of the Brazilian hospital sector with in-depth analyses of the key elements of interest in promoting and ensuring excellence... Show More + in hospital performance. It does so in an accessible manner and within the organizational and financial context of Brazil. Thus, the book can offer specific recommendations that go to the heart of the problem, as well as suggest what kinds of approaches work in that context. The recommendations themselves are based on what works in Brazil while drawing on international experiences relevant to the Brazilian context to broaden the policy options. But the authors go a step further by providing recommendations on implementation, specifically highlighting the need to strengthen governance arrangements, improve accountability, and sharpen resource management. Show Less -

The inadequacy of public services in Brazil today constrains the country's economic growth and social development. The volume of government expenditure is not the principal... Show More + bottleneck: at over 40 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Brazil's total public spending is already much higher than that of comparable middle-income countries. The vital question is how to get greater value for public money. As a federal country, improving service delivery in Brazil calls for strengthening the incentives and institutional capacities at the sub-national level, precisely where the country faces its greatest institutional development challenges. A new report examines how particular managerial innovations have been applied in two locations in Brazil to deliver improved public healthcare services. The health sector in Brazil absorbs approximately 4 percent of GDP, and spending levels are likely to rise further given the country's demographic and epidemiological profiles. Improving the efficiency of public health spending is vital to ensuring the country's public finances and macroeconomic stability in the long run. Show Less -

This report is about effective participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre. The process was initiated during the early years of re-democratization and decentralization in... Show More + Brazil, following the end of the military dictatorship in 1985. The 1988 constitution initiated a process of decentralization and tax reforms that created the fiscal space for municipalities to make more significant public investment decisions. A plethora of participatory governance institutions have since proliferated in Brazil, most importantly, municipal policy councils and participatory budgeting bodies. The Participatory Budget (OP) was formally introduced in Porto Alegre under the leadership of the Workers' Party in coalition with pro-democracy social movements. Although initially fraught with difficulties due to fiscal constraints, the OP in Porto Alegre became gradually more systematic over time. Today, the OP has a complex methodology for organizing participation in a city of over 1.4 million inhabitants, as well as for prioritizing public investments based on three main criteria: unmet basic needs, population, and citizen preferences. However, the OP constitutes one element in a broader complex system of participatory governance in Porto Alegre. Findings on the poverty and fiscal impacts of OP in Brazil suggest that OP is a participatory mechanism that has significant potential for pro-poor distributive impacts that lead to poverty reduction outcomes in the long run. Its ability to have a positive impact on fiscal performance is less evident. Show Less -

This report on Brazil's health sector is the result of collaboration between the World Bank's Latin American and Caribbean PREM Public Sector Group and the LAC Human... Show More + Development Network. This report examines how particular managerial innovations have been applied in two sub-national jurisdictions in Brazil to deliver improved public services from available resources. The health sector in Brazil absorbs approximately four percent of GDP, and its spending level is likely to rise further given the country's demographic and epidemiological profiles. Thus, improving the efficiency of public health spending can have effects beyond the quality of health services, as uncontrolled spending growth could affect the overall health of the country's public finance and macroeconomic stability in the long run. The two cases of public management innovations examined in this report demonstrate two divergent approaches to performance improvement in Brazil's public sector. Sao Paulo has introduced organizational innovation through contracting out hospital management to qualified NGOs in the form of "Social Organizations." Curitiba, in contrast, managed to strengthen performance of its primary care system within the existing human resource regime. In both cases, a central challenge is to motivate staff and align their incentives with the government's broader policy objectives. The case studies explore two types of management tools: i) those that aim to align the expectations of principal and agent and reduce information asymmetry, and ii) those that provide direct incentives to tie an employee's or manager's behavior to performance outputs. The two types are not intrinsically incompatible, but knowing how to combine these instruments is more an art than a science. This study describes the instruments that have proved important to improve service delivery in Sao Paulo and Curitiba. It attempts to explain why these instruments are important, and how they work in combination with others. Show Less -