Trade Policy in Brazil: Causes and Consequences of Our Isolation (original) (raw)
Mainstay of the growth in world economies since the 16th century, international trade gives rise to a diversity of theoretical and empirical research studies that go beyond International Economic Policy, and transition between Economics, Political Science and International Relations (Martin 2015). By addressing subjects that range from its net effect on economies (Dix-Carneiro 2014) and its capacity for distributional impact (Helpman 2016; Pavcnik 2017) to labour market arrangements (Helpman, Itskhoki and Redding 2010), cross-border trade entails issues such as migration, the environment, and human rights, to name a few. This is no different in the Brazilian context. Brazilian foreign trade performance, a recurring issue that engenders apparently irreconcilable positions, is revisited and updated in the book Política Comercial no Brasil: Causas e Consequências do Nosso Isolamento, written by Emanuel Ornelas, João Paulo Pessoa and Lucas Ferraz, especially from a domestic decision-making process perspective. The work, published in 2020, expands the debate as it investigates the country's transactional dynamics from re-democratisation to the present moment, marked by the Covid-19 pandemic. The book adds a detailed diagnosis on the causes of Brazil's timid performance in the foreign market and gives some prescriptions on how to optimize the export and import flow and, consequently, stimulate increased productivity in the country and its greater integration into the Global Value Chains. From the initial finding that Brazil is 'relatively closed' (Ornelas, Pessoa and Ferraz 2020: 22), the authors question what motives have led successive governments of different ideologies in recent decades not to cause the country to 'engage more' (Ornelas, Pessoa and Ferraz 2020: 214) with the rest of the world. To explain some of these factors, the researchers carried out a bibliographical review of the Economic Policy and made inferences, based on previous empirical studies, about the evolution of the recent trade