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The Brazilian economy struggled throughout the 1980s with a severe balance of payments crisis and high inflation, interrupting thirty years of rapid growth and structural change. Simultaneously, Br...

This paper provides a critical assessment of the New Developmental view summarized in Bresser-Pereira (2016). It is argued that although New Developmentalism correctly observes that Classical Developmentalism underestimated and insufficiently considered the role of demand as a motor of growth (this critique also applies to modern Schumpeterian views), New Developmentalism theoretically reduces or explains changes in quantities (in particular external demand) to the price mechanism (in particular the exchange rate). It is argued that the New Developmental narrative of comparative development underestimates the role of industrial policy and domestic demand in increasing productivity. Instead, New Developmentalism makes the real exchange rate the main lever for investment, structural change, and productivity growth. At the same time, New Developmentalism's description of some development trajectories is actually (though it is unacknowledged) closer to Classical Developmentalism, modern Institutionalism, and Schumpeterian thinking. Those intellectual traditions argue that development and structural change require strategic policies which go far beyond managing macroeconomic prices.

In the last decades, financial activities have grown disproportionately compared to other activities. This aroused a growing discussion in Keynesian and Marxian economists about the structures of m...

Global value chains (GVCs), led by transnational corporations (TNCs), have reshaped the world division of labor over the past two decades. GVCs are pervasive in low technology manufacturing, such as textile and apparel, as well as in more advanced industries like automobiles, electronics, and machines. This hierarchical division of labor generates wild competition at the lower value-added stages of production, where low wages and low profit margins prevail for workers and contract manufacturers in developing countries. At the top of the hierarchy another kind of competition prevails, centered on the ability to monitor and control intellectual property rights related to innovation, finance, and marketing. We argue that GVCs have had crucial effects on income inequality and the appropriation of rents in modern capitalism.

There is an extensive literature that discusses two related processes of structural change that would characterize the Brazilian economy since the 1990s, the deindustrialization and regressive specialization processes. We argue that most of the latter literature based their investigation on indicators that, though traditional, are not sufficient to support their conclusions on the continuity and intensity of the two structural change processes under analysis. Indeed, the traditional indicators of deindustrialization involving the manufacturing industry share of total value added and employment are limited for various reasons. First, because we believe that a deindustrialization analysis should focus its attention on the subset of manufacturing activities that are responsible for the main technological flows within the economy. Second, because these indicators are directly related to the investment to output ratio and the latter is positively related to the trend rate of growth of output. Thus, a decrease in the trend rate of growth of the economy can lead to the misleading conclusion that a deindustrialization process is going on. On the other hand, the traditional indicator for the analysis of regressive specialization, the manufacturing industry share of total exports, can also lead to misleading inferences if not complemented by the use of other indicators. This is particularly true in the case of the Brazilian economy, which has a strong presence and competitiveness in the three major primary commodity groups (agricultural, mineral, and oil), all of them positively affected by the fast expansion of the Chinese economy in the period under analysis. In order to overcome the limitations of these traditional indicators, we focused our analysis on the performance of the innovative industry group (II)—which comprises those manufacturing industries most related to the process of technological innovation and diffusion in the economy—used indicators of the II competitiveness in external (the Brazilian share in world exports) and internal (the domestic production share on total intermediate and final demand) markets, and analyzed the evolution of the density of the II interindustry relations (its backward and forward linkage indicators) over the period. Our analysis shows that the deindustrialization and regressive specialization processes in the Brazilian economy have not been as continuous and intense as suggested by the existing literature. In particular, we show that such processes are concentrated in the period from 2010 to 2014, due to the innovative industry group (II) competitiveness loss in domestic and external markets.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, developing countries experienced higher growth and greater geopolitical and geo-economic prominence than developed countries. The economic slowdown during the next decade started to undo at least partially, both the characteristics of decoupling and the South geopolitical strategy. This chapter is an attempt to examine the evolution of the economic, geo-economic, and geopolitical paths followed by the countries of the South in the New Millennium and the geopolitical and geo-economic response of the United States to these more assertive strategies. It also aims to articulate the study of the economic evolution with both internal and external power relations.

The paper argues along the lines of John Kenneth Galbraith in his analysis of the American “affluent society” during the “Golden Age,” when social unbalance between private wealth and public services was expanded by modern capitalism. In industrialized or developing economies, investment in public services was constrained by fiscal or ideological reasons favoring market provision. This evolution had significant impact on welfare.

This paper analyzes the development of China’s rare earths industry, emphasizing the role of state technological initiatives in the country’s transition from rare earth exporter to large industrial consumer of these raw materials. Like other industrial powers before it, China takes advantage of low-cost domestic supplies of strategic raw materials to promote higher value-added manufacturing. We argue that, in the case of rare earths, this strategy has been largely successful, disrupting a classic international division of labor that existed prior to 2000, in which China exported most of its rare earth output to wealthy countries, and transforming Chinese firms into exporters of more sophisticated downstream products. RESUMO Este artigo analisa o desenvolvimento da indústria de terras raras da China, destacando o papel de iniciativas estatais na transição deste país de exportador de terras raras para grande consumidor industrial dessas matérias-primas. Tal como outras potências industriais no passado, a China se aproveita de suas reservas de matérias-primas estratégicas, disponíveis em grande quantidade e a baixo custo de produção no território chinês, para promover setores de maior valor agregado. Argumentamos que, no caso de terras raras, esta estratégia tem sido bem-sucedida, rompendo com uma divisão internacional clássico do trabalho que existia antes de 2000, em que a China exportava a maior parte de sua produção de terras raras para países ricos, e transformando as empresas chinesas em exportadores a jusante de produtos mais sofisticados.

This paper assesses the impact of military-related programs on Chinese technical progress since 1980. We argue that efforts to modernize weapons production and integrate the civilian and military sectors of the economy have increased China's innovation potential and led to an improvement in the country's overall technological capabilities. Although it is still too early to draw sweeping conclusions, China appears to be following a road taken by other great powers before it, where the pursuit of modern defense systems stimulates the development of advanced technologies.

This inquiry explores connections between income distribution and economic growth in the United States and China, arguing that in the United States income concentration coupled with financial deregulation became a structural factor contributing to the 2007 financial crisis and to the low growth registered afterwards. In China, despite the recent income concentration, economic growth was supported by public investment decoupling Chinese economic performance from the low rates of economic growth exhibited by the United States. A comparative approach to selected Keynesian transmission mechanisms and their effects on income concentration, domestic demand, and economic growth are considered for the United States and China.

This inquiry explores crises facing developmental states in Latin America related to their national strategies for economic growth. Some patterns commonly associated with an import substitution strategy are argued to be rooted in structural and institutional variables related to an abundance of natural resources. However, with the demise of national development strategies after the 1980s, external and internal efforts and measures stemming from big business and financial capital challenged the developmental state. During the 1990s countries in Latin and South America followed similar patterns toward financial integration. Failures related to this recent strategy opened space for a new development policy.

The spread of industries in several peripheral countries after the Second World War and the great divergence that has opened up between them since the 1980s has sparked widespread debate on economic development. Interpretations based on neoclassical and on institutional economics1 are the major fields of historical explanations. Despite their wide differences on the determinants of economic growth, they share a common perspective on three basic aspects: first, the supposition that strategies of development are built on a set of government policies and on institutions that model private behaviours (of course, they disagree on which policies and institutions promote economic development); second, a ‘methodological nationalism’2 in which individual countries’ performances are essentially explained by domestic factors. The third is a corollary of the two above perceptions and says that the state as a major initiator of positive change (in resource allocation, as in the heterodox reasoning, or in the creation of market institutions, as in orthodox thought) is responsible for the success or failure of growth strategies. For the mainstream school, the wrong policies of populist states play the dominant role, for the heterodox, they are those of liberal or neo-liberal states. For both, a meritocratic state is central to successful development strategies (to avoid rent-seeking cases according to neoclassical authors, to discipline large firms according to the institutionalists).3

This paper argues that there was a remarkable similarity in the external cycles in Latin America's economic history. The desarrollo hacia fuera, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean earlier designation for the World Bank's "outward-oriented" model, that prevailed in the last part of the nineteenth century until 1930, was from the beginning a financial-export model where financial integration to the world economy played a central role. An orthodox economic policy based on fiscal contraction, a high rate of interest, and incentives to external debt in order to sustain convertibility and free capital flows was a permanent strategy of this model. After a long period distant from the world financial markets, many Latin American countries received throughout the 1970s and especially during the 1990s, huge volumes of financial capital that brought about once again a similar pattern and strategy of international integration.

Este trabalho faz uma revisão da expansão das relações econômicas entre a China e os países da América Latina na última década. O grande processo de urbanização chinesa foi o principal estímulo para as exportações de commodities desses países e a China tornou-se o maior mercado para exportação e grande fornecedor de produtos manufaturados para muitos dos países da América Latina , assim como também tem ampliado sua contribuição para investimento e crédito. Nesse processo de reestruturação da divisão internacional do trabalho consideramos dois efeitos diferentes, um "efeito de demanda" e um "efeito de estrutura" e iinvestigamos como a complementaridade e as pressões competitivas afetou o comércio dentro da região e nos países de acordo com seus diferentes padrões e estrutura produtiva. The impact of China's rise on Latin-AAmerican countries. We review in this paper the expansion of economic relations between China and Latin America Countries (LAC) in the last decade. The large process of Chinese urbanization was the main driver for LAC commodity exports and China became the largest market for export and large supplier of manufactures for many LAC and its contribution for investment and credit has enlarged as well. In this process of restructuring of international division of labor we considered two different effects, a "demand effect" and a "structure effect" and investigated how complementarity and competitive pressures affected trade within region and in LAC according to their different patterns and productive structure.

Objetiva-se neste artigo investigar a integração produtiva asiática e extrair algumas lições para o Mercosul nas últimas décadas. Demonstra-se que a conjugação de fatores estruturais, macroeconômicos e microeconômicos promoveu, no primeiro caso, uma integração produtiva “virtuosa” com elevado grau de crescimento econômico regionalmente articulado, ainda que com assimetrias na apropriação do valor e do progresso técnico. O maior contraste do Mercosul em relação à experiência asiática é a composição da pauta exportadora, vulnerabilidade externa de cada país do bloco e à inexistência de um importador líquido capaz de viabilizar a expansão de uma corrente de comércio compatível com a aceleração do crescimento econômico regional.

A partir de alguns fatos estilizados sobre o comportamento do crescimento econômico, emprego e distribuição de renda na América Latina nos anos 90, o artigo examina os principais mecanismos identificados na literatura estruturalista latino-americana sobre as relações entre abertura externa e distribuição de renda. Depois de uma breve análise histórica, argumenta-se que a partir de sua influência no regime macroeconômico, nos preços básicos e na heterogeneidade das técnicas produtivas, a abertura externa dos anos 90 liderou as mudanças distributivas observadas. After a brief historic review of Latin American economic development and some stylized facts on economic growth, employment and income distribution, the connections between trade and finance opening and income distribution are examined. We argue, following the tradition of Latin American structuralism, that through its influence on macroeconomic regime, on basic prices and on technology heterogeneity, the 1990 external opening led the shifts in income distribution.

Este trabalho busca analisar a economia política dos condicionantes do intervencionismo estadunidense que se configurou a partir do final da Guerra Fria. Para tanto, as mudanças na estrutura das Forças Armadas efetivadas desde o fim da Guerra do Vietnã serão observadas sob o viés das relações entre Estado e Mercado., This work aims to analyze the political economy of the United States interventionist policies since the end of the Cold War. In order to do so, the transformations in the Armed Forces Structure since the Vietnam War shall be observed under the prism of State-Market relations.