The production and usage of biofuels has increased worldwide, seeking goals of energy security, low-carbon energy and rural development.

The expansion of sugarcane growing in Brazil, spurred particularly by increased demand for ethanol, has triggered the need to evaluate the economic, social, and environmental impacts of this process, both on the country as a whole and on the growing regions. Even though the balance of costs and benefits is positive from an overall standpoint, this may not be so in specific producing regions, due to negative externalities. The objective of this paper is to estimate the effect of growing sugarcane on the human development index (HDI) and its sub-indices in cane producing regions. In the literature on matching effects, this is interpreted as the effect of the treatment on the treated. Location effects are controlled by spatial econometric techniques, giving rise to the spatial propensity score matching model. The authors analyze 424 minimum comparable areas (MCAs) in the treatment group, compared with 907 MCAs in the control group. The results suggest that the presence of sugarcane growing in these areas is not relevant to determine their social conditions, whether for better or worse. It is thus likely that public policies, especially those focused directly on improving education, health, and income generation/distribution, have much more noticeable effects on the municipal HDI.

Resumo O objetivo deste artigo é analisar empiricamente os impactos da adoção do sistema de metas inflacionárias para a inflação e crescimento real do produto, diferenciando os impactos entre países desenvolvidos (PD) e em desenvolvimento (PED (1.2% and 0.1%, respectively). One possible explanation is that for the PED the decrease in the output growth may be related to the difficulty they face in building their credibility, since they have to commit to more restrictive policies and a strict design for the regime.

O presente estudo avaliou a existência de uma Curva Ambiental de Kuznets (CAK) para o caso dos déficits municipais de acesso a serviços de saneamento ambiental, que podem ser considerados como medidas indiretas de degradação ambiental. Os resultados obtidos sinalizam, de uma maneira geral, a existência de uma relação entre os déficits de acesso e o desenvolvimento econômico no formato de um "N" e não no tradicional formato de um "U invertido" da CAK. Portanto, para o caso específico dos serviços de saneamento ambiental nos municípios brasileiros, a hipótese de que o desenvolvimento econômico seria a melhor solução para a preservação ambiental não é verdadeira, uma vez que, ao longo do tempo, o desenvolvimento econômico voltaria a gerar degradação ambiental.