Brazil's GPA accession will involve costs and benefits

Significance The agreement would open a market of USD1.7tn for Brazilian companies to compete for government procurement contracts internationally, but would also render them vulnerable to competition for Brazilian government contracts from foreign suppliers on equal terms. The process of negotiations is a lengthy one, as well as controversial. Impacts Accession to the GPA could facilitate Brazil’s ambition to join the OECD. Domestic companies’ lack of competitiveness within the GPA could aggravate existing problems with industrial performance. Political uncertainties surrounding the October elections could delay the pace of accession.

The “New Transamazonian Highway”: BR-319 and Its Current Environmental Degradation

The Brazilian government intends to complete the paving of the BR-319 highway, which connects Porto Velho in the deforestation arc region with Manaus in the middle of the Amazon Forest. This paving is being planned despite environmental legislation, and there is concern that its effectiveness will cause additional deforestation, threatening large portions of forest, conservation units (CUs), and indigenous lands (ILs) in the surrounding areas. In this study, we evaluated environmental degradation along the BR-319 highway from 2008 to 2020 and verified whether highway maintenance has contributed to deforestation. For this purpose, we created a 20 km buffer adjacent to the BR-319 highway and evaluated variables extracted from remote sensing information between 2008 and 2020. Fire foci, burned areas, and rainfall data were used to calculate a drought index using statistical tests for a time series. Furthermore, these were related to data on deforestation, CUs, and ILs using principal component analysis and Pearson’s correlation. Our results showed that 743 km2 of forest was deforested during the period evaluated, most of which occurred in the last four years. A total of 16,472 fire foci were identified. Both deforestation and fire foci occurred mainly outside the CUs and ILs. The most affected areas were close to capital cities, and after resuming road maintenance in 2015, deforestation increased outside the capital cities. Current government policy for Amazon occupation promotes deforestation and will compromise Brazil’s climate goals of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and deforestation.

Productive Development Partnership in Brazil

Brazil was one of the first countries to adopt significant health policies to better attend people with HIV. The integrated analysis of the high cost of medicines, public health, and access to medicines comprises an extremely complex task, and Productive Development Partnerships (PDP) was the mechanism used by the Brazilian government, with a view to technological development and training of national production complex. The PDP of atazanavir was formalized in late 2011, and the agreement includes the transfer of technology, manufacturing, and distribution of the drug. The PDP emerges as a solution found by the government to minimize the Ministry of Health drug spending and encourage the local production. However, one should not ignore that there are risks associated with regulatory barriers and problems in negotiations with the holders of technology. Thus, this chapter presents a case study of the successes the management information of the productive development partnerships in Brazil as a collaborative tool for global health.

Estimating the impact of implementation and timing of COVID-19 vaccination program in Brazil: a counterfactual analysis

The vaccines developed in 2020-2021 against the SARS-CoV-2 virus were designed to prevent severity and deaths due to COVID-19. However, how effective this vaccination campaign was at saving lives remains a methodological challenge. In this work, we developed a Bayesian statistical model to estimate the number of deaths and hospitalizations in individuals above 60 years old in Brazil. Using the actual number of hospitalized and deaths from the Brazilian database, and also the coverage of second dose according to the National Immunization Program, we rebuilt the realized scenario as well as the hypothetical scenario without vaccination in Brazil in order to perform a counterfactual analysis. By computing the difference between the hypothetical and realized scenarios, we were able to estimate the direct effect of COVID-19 vaccination in Brazil. We also evaluated two other hypothetical, but not impossible, scenarios considering earlier vaccination roll-outs. We estimated that more than 165 thousand of 60+ years old individuals were not hospitalized due to COVID-19 until August 28, 2021, and other approximately 100 thousand individuals could not have been hospitalized if the immunization started as soon it was approved in Brazil. We also estimate that more than 75 thousand lives were saved in the period analysed for the same age group, and additional 48 thousand lives could have been saved if the Brazilian Government started the immunization 8 weeks earlier.

Collaborative idea generation: an experience of open creativity in the public sector

Purpose This paper aims to analyze idea generation in a public-private collaboration of a Brazilian Government Agency. The authors start from the following research question: How did the process of open creativity occur from collaboration, network relationships and creative practice in the experience of open innovation cycles of the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Pernambuco, Brazil? Design/methodology/approach The research was characterized as a case study that empirically explored a contemporary phenomenon in a specific context. The authors conducted document research and interviews and used the content analysis technique. Findings The findings showed that open creativity enabled more efficient idea generation when the public-private partnership was established in a well-structured collaboration network with the private sector of the economy; when it consisted of a heterogeneous group of external collaborators who developed a wide exchange of expertise; and when practical actions were developed to make the creative process more efficient. Research limitations/implications The study was limited to a single reality. The study was conducted in a single country and other nations may have social and institutional elements that were not considered in the analysis and that may influence the results in similar studies. Originality/value The authors investigated open creativity in the public sector, a field that still has gaps in understanding. The authors focused on social relationships for the generation and improvement of ideas among actors external to the organization involved, a niche that is still little explored in the literature.

Indigenous Rights and covid-19 – Indigenous Land and Health Under Serious Threat in Brazil

This article analyses the impact of covid-19 on the rights of indigenous peoples, particularly in Brazil. It deals with the current situation of the Brazilian indigenous peoples, the impacts of the pandemic, the rights created on the adoption of protective sanitary measures for indigenous people and land rights in Brazil. Does the Brazilian government comply with international law, with constitutional rights of indigenous peoples in the current covid-19 crisis, particularly with the Brazilian Supreme Court decision on the adoption of protective sanitary measures for indigenous people? With a focus on the 2020 Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, this paper will identify and examine the gaps in protection of the indigenous peoples rights by reason of the impact of the covid-19 crisis. This paper argues that the crisis is misused as an occasion for land invasions, deforestation, forest fires and the denial of basic indigenous rights. Especially in Brazil, a transformative change, an emergency support for indigenous peoples, and a still stand agreement on logging and extractive industries operating next to indigenous communities are needed. Brazilian ngo statements give guidelines as to how to manage the threats of the present pandemic on indigenous peoples of Brazil. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the United Nations and the International Labour Organisation all offer further relevant suggestions as to how to address the serious impacts in the response to and the aftermath of this crisis.

Human Rights in Times of the Pandemic: A Dialogue on Migration and Indigenous Rights in Brazil before the Regional Inter-American System

This paper using the deductive method of approach based on regional scope for the protection of human rights, aims to demonstrate that the Brazilian state actions took during the pandemic, in terms of strategies, policies and measures to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic had severe consequences specially for indigenous and migrants population in Brazil, increasing the level of vulnerability of that population in its territory. It will also consider that in spite of adhering the unconditional observance of inter-American and international standards on human rights, the Brazilian government ignored such agreements and therefore causing social economic losses and about hundreds of deaths.

Time series analysis of government information about COVID-19 on social media and the number of new cases during the first 6 months of the pandemic: the Brazil case

This retrospective study sought to assess the association between the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil and the quality of educational materials published in the official profiles of Brazilian government health agencies on Instagram. Posts about COVID-19, published between January 31 and August 15, 2021, were selected, dated, quantified and classified according to their content by three researchers. Public’s engagement was calculated by the number of likes, comments and views. The quality of the educational posts was assessed by two trained and calibrated researchers (Kappa intra and inter-examiners, k=0.96 and k=0.92, respectively), using the Brazilian version of the Clear Communication Index (BR-CDC-CCI), the number of new COVID-19 cases was collected using the COVID-19 epidemic calculator provided by PAHO at https://covid-calc.org/. The relationship between the evolution of the COVID-19 indicator and the quality of educational posts was calculated using the statistical model of a fortnightly time series. On average, educational posts reached 6.4 in the BR-CDC-CCI score (median = 6.5). In the multiple model adjusted for the amount of educational posts and public engagement, it was observed that for each increase of one point in the BR-CDC-CCI score, there was a reduction of 327,864 new cases of Covid-19 (p <0.001). It was concluded that there was a relationship between the low quality of posts and the greater number of new cases of the disease, indicating the need for greater attention from Brazilian government agencies with the quality of information made available on social networks to help control the COVID-19 pandemic.

An analytics approach to investigate teacher turnover

Some educational problems embed spatial and temporal complexities, and the aggregation of these data may cause contextual information to be lost. One such example regards teacher turnover, which impacts directly the students' learning processes. In this work, we adopted an observational cross-sectional methodology, using visual analytics techniques to identify complex patterns in the mobility data of teachers in public schools from the city of São Paulo between 2016 and 2017. For this, we used education open data from the Brazilian government, which maps which teachers teach in which schools through a yearly school census. In addition, we sought to understand which are the main factors that, along with institutional rules, influence this sort of decision. To contextualize the main factors, we used synthetic indicators developed by the Brazilian government to identify different motivation clusters that may influence teachers' decisions to move to another school. As result, we identified different patterns varying according to their contract type and their respective geographical patterns. The clusters also identified as main factors: school performance, school climate, and management complexity.