Conclusion

Criticism of the structuralist theory of inflation of course did not spell the end of structuralism as a broad anti-market ideology, either in developed or developing countries. In developed countries the doctrine of market failure has come under increasingly critical scrutiny, broadly on the ground, as H.G. Johnson once put it, that ‘the possibility of market failure is not sufficient to prove the certainty of government success’. The price system, with all its acknowledged defects, may yet, on balance, be the lesser evil, compared with the operation in practice of bureaucratic planning and controls – controls which are often, as at least one contributor to the Latin American debate pointed out, a major source of the very rigidities which hamper the working of the price system.

The text leads to the following conclusions:

Item 3 - Acknowledgement of market failures does not imply endorsement of bureaucratic planning and controls

Com respeito a inferência e estimação de parâmetros populacionais, é correto afirmar:

Item 0 - Suponha que a variável !$ X !$ tenha distribuição exponencial com densidade !$ f(x)=\beta e^{-\beta x}, x > 0 !$. As estatísticas !$ \overline{X} !$ e mínimo [!$ X_1, X_2, ......., x_n !$] são estimadores não-viciados de 1/!$ \beta !$, mas a segunda é preferível à primeira por apresentar menor variância.

The Latin American Structuralist Theory of Inflation

Inflation had bedeviled economic policy in most Latin American countries for many years, and structuralist-type arguments had been put forward by opponents of liberal economic policies from time to time, in Brazil as early as 1949. But it was primarily the experience of Chile, the most conspicuous case of chronic inflation, that gave rise to the formulation of a structuralist theory of inflation. The Chilean peso had depreciated externally and domestically in all but 15 of the preceding 80 years, at annual rates which rose from around 20% in the 1940s to well over 50% in the mid-1950s. In the latter half of 1955, the Chilean Government decided on yet another effort at stabilization and employed a group of American consultants, the Klein-Saks Mission, to prepare a stabilization program. It was this, reinforced by broadly ‘monetarist’ stabilization policies recommended by the IMF in Argentina and Chile in 1958/9, that sparked off the monetarist-structuralist controversy.

The crux of the argument (in the preceding paragraph) is that:

Item 1 - Structuralist-type arguments were put forward for the first time in Brazil in 1949

The Doctrine of Market Failure

In the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, socialist and other critics of capitalism condemned it chiefly on two grounds. First, that it was unjust and exploitative. Secondly, that it was unstable, prone to crises and doomed to collapse. Rarely if ever, was capitalism criticized on the ground that its quintessential mechanism of market forces operating through the price system fails to work. This third line of criticism, which may be called the doctrine of market failure, was developed, chiefly in Britain, in the 1930s and 1940s, though traces of it can of course be found earlier in many places.

Socialist critics of capitalism condemn it on the grounds that it

Item 4 - leads the market to failure.

Um importador adquiriu vários artigos ao preço médio de US$ 15.00 com um desvio-padrão de US$ 1.00. Sabendo-se que a taxa de câmbio é de R$ 3,00 por dólar, é correto afirmar:

Item 0 - Convertendo-se o valor das compras para reais, o preço médio dos produtos adquiridos será de R$ 45,00.