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Brazilian Development: Alternative Approaches to an Increasingly Complex Field
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THE BRAZILIAN ECONOMY: ITS GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT. By BAERWERNER. (Columbus, Ohio: Grid Publishing, 1979. Pp. 239. $7.95.)
ESTADO, ACUMULACÃO E COLONIALISMO INTERNO; CONTRADIÇÕES NORDESTE I SUDESTE, 1960-1977. By CHALOULTYVES. (Petrópolis, Brazil: Editora Vozes, 1978. Pp. 150.)
EXPLORING BRAZILIAN BUREAUCRACY: PERFORMANCE AND PATHOLOGY. By DALANDROBERT T. (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1981. Pp. 455. $15.75.)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2022
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- Copyright © 1983 by the University of Texas Press
Footnotes
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I would like to thank Dr. Roberta McKown, Chairman of the Department of Political Science of the University of Alberta, for her comments and suggestions.
References
Notes
1. A concise analysis of the factors that have contributed to this tendency can be found in Paul Singer, A Crise do “Milagre”; Interpretação Crítica da Economia Brasileira (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1977).
2. Alfred Stepan notes that “the very absence of strong political institutions in a country such as Brazil has meant that all major actors attempt to co-opt the military as an additional supportive force in the pursuit of their political goals.” Stepan, The Military in Politics: Changing Patterns in Brazil (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 61.
3. They argue that “the structure of the Brazilian economy would have been different with a different rate of population growth, but it is most difficult to demonstrate how much better or worse it would have been.” Merrick and Graham, pp. 294-95.
4. McDonough's comprehensive study of the Brazilian elites during this same period appeared in larr 16, No. 1 (1981):79-106.
5. An excellent essay that explores attitude reliability (and attitude mutability over relatively short time frames) is: Philip E. Converse, “Attitudes and Non-Attitudes: Continuation of a Dialogue,” The Quantitative Analysis of Social Problems, ed. Edward R. Tufte (Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley, 1970), pp. 168-89. Converse stresses that reliable attitudes evince strong and self-motivated interest (that is, apart from the interest engendered by the interviewer) on the part of the subject. “Non-attitudes,” on the other hand, are lightly held views and are therefore likely to change drastically over relatively short periods of time. According to Converse, they cannot be measured with any degree of reliability.
6. Flynn notes that after the 1968 crackdown, the military “more clearly than ever before … were seen, and perceived themselves, as masters of the country.” Flynn, p. 438. Furthermore, Thomas G. Sanders, in an article written in 1971, argued that Brazil during the Médici regime “seems to be well into a stage of ambiguity representing a transition between concerted opposition and the gradual expansion of public support of and institutions for communicating information on the limitation of births.” Sanders, “The Politics of Population in Brazil,” American Universities Field Staff Reports, East Coast South American Series, Vol. 15, No. 1 (1971), p. 1. The opinion of the military hierarchy might well have tended to direct elite opinion in such circumstances.
7. Furthermore, they assert that “birth control is an issue [sic] for which serious intere-lite misunderstanding is comparatively rare” (p. 104).
8. From a sample of 269 respondants, which represents a 41 percent response from the 656-member target sample.
9. From 1,314 interviews conducted exclusively in southeast and southern Brazil.
10. The bibliographical dimension of the work is, in itself, a major interpretive study.
11. Preliminary data from the 1980 census revealed an unexpectedly low total of 119,024,600. Folha de São Paulo, 19 December 1980, p.1.
12. Examples include the effects of policies of manumission of slaves (p. 52) and the critical need—based upon industrial infra structural requirements—for immigrant expertise in the late nineteenth century that tended to offset many of the negative consequences that might have resulted in the area of domestic employment from their massive influx into Brazil (p. 112).
13. The work includes major studies of long-term population trends, slavery, immigration, regional population redistribution, the demographic structure of the labor force, rural-urban migration, urban poverty, fertility and mortality, population and development planning, and the future of population growth in Brazil.
14. Tyler notes that “the public sector, including government enterprises, has accounted for over 50 percent of total capital formation in Brazil in recent years” (p. 40).
15. Baer adds that “state enterprises dominate in steel, mining and petrochemicals. They control over 80% of power generating capacity and most of the public utilities. It has been estimated that in 1974, for the 100 largest firms (in value of assets), 74 percent of the combined assets belonged to state enterprises. Similarly state banks play a dominant role in the financial system. Of the fifty largest banks (in terms of deposits), state banks accounted for about 56% of total deposits in 1974 and about 65 percent of loans to the private sector” (p. 100).
16. Baer hypothesizes that only dynamic, innovative (and hence growing) firms can hope to attract and retain qualified personnel (p. 156).
17. It has recently been reported that the government intends to sell about 100 of the 564 state-owned firms to the private sector, although the larger policy ramifications of this move remain unclear. Latin America Weekly Report WR-81-29 (24 July 1981):2-3.
18. The argument is that “the higher aggregate demand resulting from the defense of the coffee sector drew more investment into the industrial sector than was attracted away by opportunities in the coffee sector” (Baer, p. 45).
19. He insists that this early import substitution did not lead to “industrialization” (p. 48).
20. This second view is most closely associated with the dependentistas.
21. Three of the four chapters have been published previously as research papers, and although all four deal with problems of Brazilian industry, all but the first chapter tend to focus on relatively specific questions. Tyler observes that “if there is a central, underlying theme discernible in the separate chapters, it could be expressed as: the observed vitality of the industrial economy has been conditioned by market forces, as sometimes modified and distorted, however, by government policies” (p. xvii).
22. Tyler's occasional policy recommendations underscore the practicality of such specificity. See, for example, his comments regarding the advisability of restructuring government financing programs for small businesses, pp. 96-99.
23. Furtado, Análise do ‘Modelo’ Brasileiro (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1972), p. 8.
24. E.g., Daland, Brazilian Planning: Development, Politics and Administration (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1967), and Daland, “Attitudes toward Change among Brazilian Bureaucrats,” Journal of Comparative Administration 4, No. 2 (August, 1972): 167-203.
25. His earlier thesis was that “forces internal and external to Brazil have combined to utilize the classical model of bureaucracy as the pattern for structuring developmental planning and administration, and that this model fails to satisfy basic requirements of the Brazilian political culture for identifiable reasons.” Brazilian Planning, p. 10. Although this theme is not entirely absent from his latest work (see p. 362, where Daland analyzes the problems of Vargas's bureaucracy largely from this perspective), it appears to have been dropped as a major hypothesis.
26. Daland stresses the importance of new institutional arrangements, such as the grupos de trabalho, in linking center and periphery bureaucracies.
27. Daland repeatedly stresses that “the ‘normal’ patterns of administrative culture and administrative behavior in Brazil are deeply buried in the history and culture of the society and will not easily be changed” (pp. 431-32).
28. Daland discovered, for example, that of 325 top-level administrators surveyed, 60 percent “agreed that, in resolving administrative problems, it is better to use methods already proven by experience” (p. 213).
29. That is, regarding the continued applicability of his generalizations and conclusions, all of which are posed in the present tense.
30. It should be noted, on the other hand, that many of Daland's own observations tend to contradict this static impression of Brazilian bureaucracy, reinforcing instead the view that it is engaged in a rapid process of change (e.g., Daland, p. ix).
31. Daland observes, in reference to this period, that “for the first time in Brazilian history, the government has both the motivation to create an effective, high performance civil bureaucracy, and the power to do so without fear of political disaster from any direction” (p. 262). These conditions would appear to have changed to some extent since 1971.
32. A major modification to the system that unfortunately does not receive very much consideration in the book.
33. Oliveira stresses the importance of the competition between the “indigenous” northeast Brazilian bourgeoisie (sugar wealth) and the cotton-cattle producing latifundários of the seritão (with their close ties to international and south-central Brazilian interests). He also analyzes the part played by the rural and (admittedly nascent) urban proletariat of the Northeast. Noting that “na região atrasada [do Nordeste] … os conflitos de classe tomam a feição mais próxima da que se tem chamado de ‘Clássica’,” he concludes that the task of the investigation is not to label specific class interests as “classical” or “non-classical,” but rather to discover “determinantes da conduta dos homens e das classes sociais que formam e a que pertencem” (p. 96).
34. See Flynn's statement: “The principal argument of this book has been that the coup of 1964 and the regime to which it gave birth can only be understood in terms of the relations between social classes, the contending interests of those classes, and sometimes fractions of classes, and the way in which the process of competing interests finds expression in the change from ‘Old Republic’ to Estado Novo, in the party system after 1945, and finally in the coup of 1964” (p. 519).
35. In direct reference to Oliveira's book, Chaloult says that his approach “vizualiza as relacões atuais entre Estado e regiões, estudando, por exemplo, as politícas do Estado face as regiões … ” (p. 16). (Emphasis in the original.)
36. Chaloult, p. 16.
37. This careful and well-documented work is a revision and up-dating of his doctoral dissertation: Regional Differentials and the Role of the State: Economic-Political Relationships between the Northeast and Southeast of Brazil, Diss. Cornell, 1976 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University, Latin American Studies Program, Dissertation Series No. 70, 1977). Among the substantive additions to the present publication are precisely these brief references to the importance of the analysis of class conflict.
38. Such identification would constitute a difficult enterprise: an analysis of the Northeastern elite, for example, would tend to disclose a significant level of interest sharing with elites of other regions. A report in Veja notes, for example, that Governor Tarcísio Burity of Paraíba has said that “ja fui procurado por um grande industrial nordestino … que me disse achar muito melhor o governo aplicar em regiões desenvolvidas, triplicar o investimento e, com as sobras, ajudar o nordeste.” Veja 654 (18 March 1981):54.
39. Oliveira, p. 113.
40. This paragraph does not appear in his dissertation.
41. This book, as the title indicates, is an elegy to his own past efforts, to his deceased wife, and to what he regards as the demise after 1964, if not the original futility, of the development program of the SUDENE.
42. Dimensions of this “failure,” including the conflict of the agency with U.S. foreign policy, are discussed in Riordan Roett's The Politics of Foreign Aid in the Brazilian Northeast (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1972), and Joe Page's The Revolution That Never Was; Northeast Brazil, 1955-1964 (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1972).
43. Both of these expressions have been defined and explored in their wider theoretical implications in the works of other members of CEBRAP, notably Fernando Henrique Cardoso.
44. This explains the title of the work, a clever reminder that “regionalism” can be, at least in some respects, a kind of “article of faith.”
45. Flynn comments that “the question of the role of multinational or transnational corporations in Brazil's economy and politics was, and still remains, the most hotly debated and far-reaching issue of national politics” (pp. 488-89).
46. Obviously Flynn does not mean to say that the “current interpretations” were sufficient, in and of themselves, to topple the government, although his failure to define his use of the term political more clearly relegates the precise nature of this analysis to the imagination.
47. This tendency might explain the tenure of Getúlio Vargas, a figure for whom Flynn expresses admiration.
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