State and industrialisation in Brazil
Abstract
From the 1950s until the end of the 1970s, the state played an active role in
structuring and consolidating the industrial sector in Brazil. However, the high degree and
permanent nature of protection for the domestic market, together with insufficient scientific
and technological development, produced a largely inefficient, technologically backward
and internationally uncompetitive industry. It was able to sell abroad because the system of
promotion for exports of manufactures offset the anti-export bias of the protection system.
These problems were aggravated in the 1980s, when the state not only stopped orienting
industrial development but actually began retarding it.
JEL Classification: L52; H11.
Keywords: Role of the State industrialisation industrial policy