Albert Fishlow

Higher Education has become an increasingly competitive field, and knowledge, its essence, has become a global commodity. Consequently, universities all over the world have been under pressure to respond to growing new demands quickly, dynamically and creatively. In the Brazilian context, overcoming the challenges that these Higher Education institutions face requires a significant effort to adapt and change, especially by public universities. In this essay we analyze the main challenges of Brazilian Higher Education institutions, especially those resulting from the Coronavirus crisis. We focus on challenges such as quality of Higher Education, funding and academic management. To this end, we explore some of the main changes that Higher Education institutions have undergone over time. We also highlight some alternative paths for those challenges, including reflections on opportunities that have arisen following the pandemic.

This paper exams the impact of high levels of bank debt, leverage, credit obtained from government banks and cash reserves in the long and short terms investments of firms in the main Latin American countries after this crisis. For this purpose, it is applied a difference-in-differences test in a sample of more than 500 public and private firms, using hand-collected data of firms’ governmental bank dependence. The review period considers five previous (2003–2007) and subsequent years (2008–2012) to the crisis. The major results are reduction of long-term investments for firms with greater banking dependence, as well as short-term investments for firms with a higher level of cash reserves. Besides, firms that are more reliant on government-owned banks reduce capital expenditures. Differently from other studies, this one examines the impact of the last global financial crisis on the firms´ investment, considering its dependence of bank debt of institutions that belongs to the government or not. Understanding the mechanisms available to emerging economies can shed light on new countercyclical policies of governments and changes in the legislations of the financial system.