Brazil From Inside DEVELOPMENT IN A LAND OF CONTRASTS (original) (raw)

Critical Debates Brazil at a Crossroads

I n the early years of this century, Brazil was celebrated internationally as an emerging power. Global scholars and international media have put Brazil in the spotlight as a case of success, due both to its political and economic domestic reforms and to its process of international insertion. According to the international media's expectations and assessments of the " country of the future, " the future had already arrived. The cover of The Economist of 11/12/2009 was suggestively titled " Brazil Takes Off. " Foreign Policy of 2/28/2012 also celebrated Brazil as " South America's emerging superpower, " due to its active participation in global economic output and its actions alongside other BRICS members. This overestimated constructed image of Brazil was not entirely unsupported, as the country had the largest geographical area in Latin America—the fifth world-wide—and upheld the seventh-highest GDP among world economies in 2014. Furthermore , taking into account that Brazil is a country with only one official language , it has an abundance of natural resources—unrestricted by external conflicts and natural disasters—and its climate is favorable for farming and agriculture, it is not illogical to envisage anything but Brazil's rise.

THE DEPLORABLE TRAJECTORY OF BRAZIL THROUGHOUT HISTORY

This article demonstrates that Brazil failed to achieve high levels of political, economic and social development. It can be seen from the analysis of our article that the problems faced by Brazil at the moment and unresolved result from causes that have been added and accumulated throughout its history of more than 500 years, that is, in the colonial period and during the Empire and the Republic. The trajectory of Brazil throughout its history is deplorable because the country still faces problems that were created and persist since the colonial period and the attempts of their overcoming were aborted by the repression against the social movements, by the overthrow of governments committed to the progress of the country and with the adoption of anti-national and anti-social government policies.

Interpretations of Underdevelopment in Brazil Interpretations of Underdevelopment in Brazil

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, 2020

Brazil is a vast and highly complex country that is subordinated to its central hegemonic poles and that combines both backwardness, modernity, progress interrupted by unfinished cycles of growth, and extreme inequality. Paradoxically, it is on the one hand ranked among the nine most advanced capitalist countries in the world and, on the other, listed as one of the nine countries with the worst income distribution. Attempts to interpret these dilemmas, historical disjunctives, and impasses have produced a plethora of original intellectual work that deals with the specificities of this most dynamic and yet highly contradictory national space. A select few authors have produced extensive work on the subject and have legitimized themselves as the pinnacle of classical interpreters of Brazilian social and political thought. The originality, broad scope of analysis, and ingenuity of these great national thinkers have made them the authors of choice for those seeking to better understand Brazil as a nation. Their classics have formulated key and critical questions relating to the often-interrupted construction of this nation and the truncated, material, and spiritual or immaterial development of the Brazilian civilization as a whole, which began as a former Portuguese colony founded on slave labor. These are very comprehensive formulations, with a long-term historical perspective produced by those who have taken a very profound and highly structural look at Brazil, shedding light on aspects of its hitherto-obscure or unquestioned reality, enlightening and inviting to think more coherently, boldly, and consequently about its present and, indeed, future. Among the main contributors are the likes of Caio Prado Júnior, Celso Furtado and Florestan Fernandes, who have developed approaches to help unveil the nature and characteristics of the processes of dependence and underdevelopment that are so specific to Brazil’s peripheral capitalism.

A Global Power in the Making: Development in Brazil, 1930-Present

The following essay provides a detailed history of Brazil's development narrative from 1930 to the present with Rostow's five stages of economic growth as its framework. It aims to demonstrate how Brazil's emphasis on high-mass consumption and global influence is similar to and different from the United States.

The emmergence of Brazil

Brazil is no longer condemned to be the " country of the future. " After six presidential elections over the past quarter century, the world's third-largest democracy and sixth-largest economy now has nearly twenty years' experience with low infl ation and a level of political stability that few countries in the world can match. Although some of the highest inequalities in the world remain, the Brazilian middle class has grown dramatically over the past decade to become the single largest socioeconomic group. Self-suffi cient in petroleum and on the verge of exploiting some of the planet's largest and deepest offshore oil fi elds, Brazil has also become the world's greenest large economy, with nearly three-quarters of its energy provided by hydroelectricity and biofuels. In 2014 the country will host the World Cup, and in 2016 Rio de Janeiro will follow up as the site of the Summer Olympics. Although recent economic growth has been disappointing, as most of the world was shaken by the massive recession after 2008, Brazil posted impressive economic growth, in particular with the help of a world commodities boom. The rediscovery of Brazil has already produced an impressive array of books that attempt to sum up the country for the general public, policy makers, and the business community. As the world's attention turns to the World Cup and the P6245.indb 221 P6245.indb 221