Tatiane Almeida de Menezes

Demand elasticities for food products in Brazil: a two-stage budgeting system

The object of this article is to estimate demand elasticities for a basket of staple food important for providing the caloric needs of Brazilian households. These elasticities are useful in the measurement of the impact of structural reforms on poverty. A two-stage demand system was constructed, based on data from Household Expenditure Surveys (POF) produced by IBGE (The Brazilian Bureau of Statistics) in 1987/88 and 1995/96. We have used panel data to estimate the model, and have calculated income, own-price, and cross-price elasticities for eight groups of goods and services and, in the second stage, for 11 sub groups of staple food products. We estimated those elasticities for the whole sample of consumers and for two income groups.

Elasticidade-renda dos produtos alimentares nas regiões metropolitanas brasileiras: uma aplicação da POF 1995/1996

The aim of this paper is to estimate the income elasticity for thirty-six food commodities. The database used was the Household Budgeting Survey (POF, 1995/96) from IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics), which has extremely detailed information about consumption in eleven bigger Brazilian urban regions. The variables used in estimation process come from the survey micro-data. This procedure allowed that the logarithms of the prices of food and the monthly per capita familiar income were directly calculated from the individualized observations, instead of aggregate data. The methodology estimation was the QUAIDS model. The results allow deepening the knowledge on the differences of the consumption standards among the diverse income strata, as well as between distinct regions as Southeastern and South and the Brazilian Northeast. It was demonstrated that there is an insufficiency in the domiciliary food consumption in Brazil and that such fact is concentrated in the low-income families, in which the expenditure with foods represents the biggest share of the budget.

Commodity Price Changes and Their Impacts on Poverty in Developing Countries: The Brazilian Case

The objective of the paper is to provide an estimative of the impacts that changes in international prices of agricultural commodities will have on income distribution and poverty in Brazil. To do so, a Social Accounting Matrix is constructed and applied, using a Leontief-Miyazawa model framework. The SAM is defined for 40 products, and households are allocated into 10 groups, being 6 agricultural and 4 urban. Demand elasticities (price and income) for the products defined in the SAM are considered, as well as limitations on the supply of agricultural inputs. The results indicate that a 50% reduction in tariffs across the board, by all countries and for all products, will produce minor impacts in Brazil: national GDP would increase by up to 1.6%, and the impacts on poverty and income inequality, although positive, would be very small.

Testing inference in heteroskedastic fixed effects models

This paper considers the issue of performing testing inference in fixed effects panel data models under heteroskedasticity of unknown form. We use numerical integration to compute the exact null distributions of different quasi-t test statistics and compare them to their limiting counterpart. The test statistics use different heteroskedasticity-consistent standard errors. Our results reveal that the asymptotic approximation is usually poor in small samples when the test statistic is based on the covariance matrix estimator proposed by Arellano (1987). The quality of the approximation is greatly increased when the standard error is obtained using other heteroskedasticity-consistent estimators, most notably the CHC4 estimator. Our results also reveal that the performance of Arellano’s test improves considerably when standard errors are computed using restricted residuals.

Electrophysiological evaluation of the pudendal nerve and urethral innervation in female stress urinary incontinence

Introduction and hypothesisAlthough still a matter of debate, stress urinary incontinence (SUI) may be accompanied by damage to urethral and pelvic floor innervations, thus promoting dysfunctions of the urethral support and sphincteric closure mechanisms. The aim of this study was to analyze the pelvic floor and urethral innervations through pelvic electrophysiological tests to identify whether neurological alterations interfere with urinary continence and urethral functional activity.MethodsThis prospective study included 52 women, 33 with clinically and urodynamically proven SUI and 19 continent volunteers matched for age, height, parity, and number of vaginal deliveries by the propensity score method. The patients were divided according to the severity of urinary loss evaluated by measuring abdominal leak point pressure (ALPP). Pudendal nerve terminal motor latency (PNTML), pudendal somatosensory evoked potential (SSEP) latencies, urethral and clitoral sensory thresholds, and urethroanal reflex latency were tested.ResultsSUI and control subjects did not differ in PNTML, SSEP latency, and clitoral sensory thresholds. However, reduced responsiveness to urethral electrosensitivity and prolonged urethroanal reflex latency were detected in most incontinent patients. In addition, urethral electrosensitivity was altered in suspected intrinsic sphincteric dysfunction.ConclusionsUrethral afferent pathways can be altered in women with SUI and may play an important role in evoking intrinsic sphincteric dysfunction.

Nível e evolução da desigualdade dos gastos familiares no Brasil: uma análise para as regiões metropolitanas no período 1996 a 2003

A partir da utilizacao dos microdados da Pesquisa de Orcamento Familiar (POF) dos bienios 1995-96 e 2002-03, o trabalho fornece evidencias a respeito dos niveis e da evolucao da desigualdade da distribuicao dos gastos familiares per capita e da desigualdade da distribuicao do consumo familiar per capita no Brasil metropolitano e a respeito da importância dos diferentes tipos de gastos familiares nas dinâmicas observadas. Os resultados, obtidos a partir de indicadores tradicionais de desigualdade e de analises de Dominância de Lorenz, apontam para importantes movimentos em termos de diminuicao da desigualdade em ambos os tipos de gastos. Medida a desigualdade pelo indice de Gini, observa-se que a reducao deste indice e afetada de forma significativa pelas dinâmicas dos gastos com Habitacao, Higiene e Cuidados Pessoais e Vestuario, favoraveis a diminuicao da desigualdade, e pelas as dinâmicas dos gastos com Educacao, Saude e Alimentacao, favoraveis a desigualdade. Diferencas regionais sao apontadas a partir das regioes metropolitanas de Recife e Sao Paulo.

Preferência revelada e arbitragem espacial: determinando um ranking de qualidade de vida para as regiões metropolitanas do Brasil

Based in the seminal work of Kahn (1995), the article proposes new methodologies to rank localities in terms of quality of life, applying them to the set of Brazilian metropolitan regions with data from Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicilio (PNAD) of the year of 2004, after controlling for regional disparities of cost of life by using Azzoni et alii (2000) Price Index. The new proposals eliminate most of fragilities in building life quality indices from estimation of hedonic prices and take in account regional diference in prices of good and services tradable among regions. To highlight the consistency of the results, additional evidence for the year of 1993 is supplied.

Years of potential life lost due to motorcycle accidents

Introduction: Traffic accidents represent a serious public health problem, because they kill approximately 1.24 million persons annually, and leave another 20 to 50 million with non-fatal lesions and traumatisms worldwide. In Brazil, in the year 2011, motorcyclists alone were responsible for one third of these deaths. Therefore, the aim of this study was to estimate the years of potential life lost due to motorcycle accidents, according to sex and age group, and analyze the trend of the indicator for the state of Pernambuco in the period from 2005 to 2014. Methods and Results an ecological study based on data from the System of Information about Mortality was used. The indicator and rate were calculated by using the age limit of 70 years. The linear regression model and Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney tests were used, at the level of significance of 5% and confidence of 95%. The most affected sex and age-range were men between 20-29 years of age. The rates followed a trend of growth in both sexes, in the young population with the exception of those from 10 to 19 years of age. Conclusions: This context points out the magnitude and precociousness of motorcycle accidents in both sexes and the young population.

Wage differentials by firm size: the efficiency wage test in a developing country

Using data from the Brazilian Labor Monthly Survey (PME/ IBGE) for the years of 2006 and 2007, the paper investigates if the wage differential by firm size in Brazil can be explained by the predictions of the Efficiency Wage Theory. It is adopted a Switching Regression Model to estimate if large size companies pay a higher wage premium for dispended labor effort, as compared to smaller enterprises. The results prove the EW predictions since they evidence positive relationships between wages and labor effort, schooling and longer job duration. However, such findings are not sufficient to explain the existence of wage differentials by firm size in the Brazilian labor market.