In the 1950s–80s, Brazil built one of the most advanced industrial networks among the "developing" countries, initially concentrated in the state of São Paulo. But from the 1980s, decentralization of industry spread to other states reducing São Paulo's relative importance in the country's industrial product. This volume draws on social, economic, and demographic data to document the accelerated industrialization of the state and its subsequent shift to a service economy amidst worsening social and economic inequality. Through its cultural institutions, universities, banking, and corporate sectors, the municipality of São Paulo would become a world metropolis. At the same time, given its rapid growth from 2 million to 12 million residents in this period, São Paulo dealt with problems of distribution, housing, and governance. This significant volume elucidates these and other trends during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and will be an invaluable reference for scholars of history, policy, and the economy in Latin America.

In developed countries like the US, Germany and the UK it has been observed that workers who perform non-routine activities, either cognitive or manual, have benefited in terms of employment and income, while those performing routinary tasks have seen their job prospects and wages decline. This has led to a polarization of the labor markets and to a decrease in certain measures of inequality. This phenomenon has been attributed to task-biased technological change (TBTC), which differs from the skilled biased technological change in the fact that not only highly skilled workers have benefited from technology advancement. This book presents evidence of how digitalization and task-biased technological change are affecting the labor markets of different regions of the world and examines the factors that cause this inequality among nations. It examines recent issues around the effect of task-biased technological change on labor markets and the economy in general, with a comparison of different countries in Central and Eastern Europe, North America, and Latin America, as well as in other regions of the world. The incorporation of the abovementioned regions presents relevant particularities for the subject matter addressed in the book. The book also considers questions such as how labor market effects differ by gender and what the impact of digital skills on employment, inequalities and public policies might be. In so doing, it identifies the advances, opportunities, and changes that have taken place, while also making public policy proposals. The main market for the book is the global community of graduate students and researchers in the field of economics and, specifically, in the study of labor markets.

This book analyzes the contribution of financial market institutions—banks and the stock and bond exchange—to São Paulo's economic modernization at the turn of the twentieth century.

A history of the society and economy of Sao Paulo from its origins to the introduction of coffee in the mid-19th century."

Why did a practice that had been considered a duty stop being a duty, or, conversely, why did daughters lose the right they had previously enjoyed of receiving from their parents the wherewithal to contribute to the support of their marriage? Despite the many historical and anthropological studies about dowry, to the best of my knowledge this is the first analysis of its disappearance. My hypothesis at a general level is that the institution of dowry was among the many fetters to the development of capitalism, such as entail, monopolies, and the privileges of the nobility, of churchmen, and of army officers, that disappeared as the influence of industrial capital spread worldwide. Yet entail, monopolies, and privileges were abolished legally, whereas the dowry was not abolished legally, it disappeared in practice. Thus the question remains: what led individual families to change their customs regarding dowry? And they changed remarkably. I found that, in the seventeenth century, practically all propertied families in São Paulo endowed every one of their daughters, favoring them by giving dowries far exceeding the value of what their brothers would inherit later on. By the early nineteenth century, in contrast, long before the custom of dowry had disappeared, less than a third of the propertied families in São Paulo were endowing their daughters, and those who did gave comparatively smaller dowries, with a very different content, while some families endowed only one or two of several daughters. How to explain this transformation in customs? I will argue throughout this book that the practice of dowry altered because of changes in society, the family, and marriage. Since dowry is a transfer of property between family members, changes in the concept of property, in the way property is acquired and held, or in business practices are relevant to an understanding of change in the institution of dowry, as are changes in the function of the family in society, the way it is integrated into production, and how it supports its members. The changes experienced by Brazilian society that help explain the decline and disappearance of the dowry are many of the same transformations that have been observed in more central regions of the Western world. Through a long process that started in the eighteenth century and continued into the early twentieth century, Brazil changed from a hierarchical, ancien régime type of society in which status, family, and patron-client relations were primary to a more individualistic society in which contract and the market increasingly reigned. A society divided vertically into family clans changed gradually into a society divided horizontally into classes. As the state grew stronger, it took over functions previously performed by the family, which in seventeenth-century São Paulo's frontier society had included municipal government and defense. Between the seventeenth and the late nineteenth centuries, a new concept of private property developed. The family changed from being the locus of both production and consumption to being principally the locus of consumption, while "family" and "business" became formally separate. The power of the larger kin declined and the conjugal family became more important, and marriage was transformed from predominantly a property matter to an avowed "love" relationship, the economic underpinnings of which were no longer made explicit. At the same time there was a change from the strong authority of the patriarch over adult sons and daughters to their greater independence, and from arranged marriages to marriages freely chosen by the bride and groom. These transformations took place in Brazil starting in the eighteenth century and continuing throughout the nineteenth century in a gradual and complex manner so that both old and new characteristics often coexisted at a given time, sometimes even within the same family. As these changes occurred, the

The first social history examining all aspects of Brazil's radical transition from a predominantly rural society to an urban one.