In Brazil, the confluence of strong global demand for the country's major products, global successes for its major corporations, and steady results from its economic policies is building confidence and even reviving dreams of grandeza --the greatness that has proven elusive in the past. Even as the current economic crisis tempers expectations of the future, the trends identified in this book suggest that Brazil will continue its path toward becoming a leading economic power in the future.

Once seen as an economic backwater, Brazil now occupies key niches in energy, agriculture, service industries, and even high technology. Yet Latin America's largest nation still struggles with endemic inequality issues and deep-seated ambivalence toward global economic integration.

Scholars and policy practitioners from Brazil, the United States, and Europe recently gathered to investigate the present state and likely future of the Brazilian economy. This important volume is the timely result. In "Brazil as an Economic Superpower?" international authorities focus on five key topics: agribusiness, energy, trade, social investment, and multinational corporations. Their analyses and expertise provide not only a unique and authoritative picture of the Brazilian economy but also a useful lens through which to view the changing global economy as a whole.

Climate change impacts-more heat, drought, extreme rainfall, and stronger storms-have already harmed communities around the globe. Even if the world could cut its carbon emissions to zero tomorrow, further significant global climate change is now inevitable. Although we cannot tell with certainty how much average global temperatures will rise, we do know that the warming we have experienced to date has caused significant losses, and that the failure to prepare for the consequences of further warming may prove to be staggering. Building a Resilient Tomorrow does not dwell on overhyped descriptions of apocalyptic climate scenarios, nor does it travel down well-trodden paths surrounding the politics of reducing carbon emissions. Instead, it starts with two central facts: climate impacts will continue to occur, and we can make changes now to mitigate their effects. While squarely confronting the scale of the risks we face, this pragmatic guide focuses on solutions-some gradual and some more revolutionary-currently being deployed around the globe. Each chapter presents a thematic lesson for decision-makers and engaged citizens to consider, outlining replicable successes and identifying provocative recommendations to strengthen climate resilience. Between animated discussions of ideas as wide-ranging as managed retreat from coastal hot-zones to biological approaches for resurgent climate-related disease threats, Alice Hill and Leonardo Martinez-Diaz draw on their personal experiences as senior officials in the Obama Administration to tell behind-the-scenes stories of what it really takes to advance progress on these issues. The narrative is dotted with tales of on-the-ground citizenry, from small-town mayors and bankers to generals and engineers, who are chipping away at financial disincentives and bureaucratic hurdles to prepare for life on a warmer planet. For readers exhausted by today's paralyzing debates on yearly "fluke" storms or the existence of climate change, Building a Resilient Tomorrow offers better ways to manage the risks in a warming planet, even as we work to limit global temperature rise.

In Globalizing in Hard Times, Leonardo Martinez-Diaz examines the sudden and substantial increase in cross-border ownership of commercial banks in countries where bank ownership had long been restricted by local rules. Many parties the World Bank and the IMF, the world's largest commercial banks, their home governments, and their negotiators had been pushing for a relaxation of ownership rules since the early 1980s and into the 1990s, when bank profitability levels in advanced industrial societies went flat. In their hunt for higher returns on assets, the major banks looked to expand business overseas, but through the mid-1990s their efforts to impose more liberal ownership regimes in nationalist countries proved largely unsuccessful.

Martinez-Diaz illustrates the ongoing political resistance to liberalized ownership rules in Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, and South Korea. He then demonstrates the importance of a series of events the Mexican crisis and the Brazilian banking shock in 1994 1995 and the Asian crisis of 1997 1998 among them in finally knocking down barriers to foreign ownership of banks. After these upheavals, policymakers who were worried about their political survival and who were sometimes pressed by the IMF and foreign governments reshaped the regulatory environment in key emerging markets. Self-proclaimed global banks eagerly grasped the opportunity to expand their operations worldwide, but after the initial shock, domestic politics reasserted themselves, often diluting the new, liberal rules."

Networks are thriving in global politics. Some bring policy-makers from different countries together to share problems and to forge possible solutions, free from rules of representation, decision-making, and transparency which constrain more formal international organizations. This book asks whether developing countries can benefit from such networks? Or are they safer to conduct their international relations in formal institutions? The answer varies. The key lies in how the network is structured and what it sets out to achieve. This book presents a fascinating account of how some networks have strengthened the position of developing country officials, both at home, and in their international negotiations. Equally, it points to conditions which make it perilous for developing countries to rely on networks.