The Brazilian Election and Central Bank Independence

From my post at the Berkeley Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS) blog:

Brazilians will head to the polls on October 5 to vote in a tight presidential race. President Dilma Rousseff’s leading challenger is Socialist Party candidate Marina Silva. A key component of Silva’s economic platform is her support for a more independent central bank. Central bank independence, long a topic of interest to economists, is now capturing wide public attention — and for good reason...

You can read the rest at the CLAS blog. There is also a lot of interesting material there about the economics, culture, and politics of Latin America. For example, there's a video of a recent CLAS seminar by Professor João Saboia on "Macroeconomics, the Labor Market, and Income Distribution in Brazil." I wrote an article on his lecture that will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies. Since CLAS is a collaboration between professors and graduate students in many different departments at Berkeley, there is a great mix of material there on cinema, literature, the environment, policy, etc.