Clara Zanon Brenck is a Professor of Economics at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG) and a researcher at Made. Clara Zanon Brenck é professora de economia na Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais e pesquisadora do Centro de Pesquisa em Macroeconomia das Desigualdades – Made/USP.

August 1, 2025

Analysis

Lula’s Fiscal Cage

The winners and losers in Brazil’s new tax regime

Among the factors securing Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s victorious return to power in the 2022 Brazilian presidential elections, the most important was the promise to increase government spending. But two years later, disputes over the public budget already show…

July 17, 2024

Analysis

Why So High?

The institutional challenges of Brazil's interest rate policy

The clashes between Lula and Campos Neto illustrate something of the complex and controversial issue of interest-rate setting in Brazil.

November 18, 2023

Interviews

Rules of Restraint

Fiscal politics in Brazil, Germany, and the European Union

The majority of countries in the world have some sort of fiscal rule: an institutional constraint on fiscal policies to discourage government overspending and reduce political influence on state expenditure. But these rules have their own politics. As Clara Zanon…

October 5, 2023

Analysis

The Politics of Fiscal Restraint

Three decades of rule-based fiscal policy in Brazil

The adoption of fiscal rules has emerged as a global trend over the past four decades. While institutional constraints to fiscal policy were uncommon before the 1990s, recent data indicates that they have since been put in force in more…