The Camaçari Industrial Complex in Bahia attracted worldwide attention following BYD’s announcement in 2023 that it would be home to the electric vehicle company’s largest factory outside China. What will the wave of Chinese investment mean for Brazil’s workers?

Central banks are back in the spotlight. After more than three decades of low inflation in rich countries, the rise in prices observed between 2021 and 2023 forced academic discussions into the public sphere. Such debates are not restricted to…

While the world’s attention was focused on the United States presidential election that would deliver Donald Trump a decisive victory and a second Presidency, Brazil’s municipal elections in October were signalling the political balance for the coming years within the…

The 2017 reform of Brazil’s labor law is part of a broader movement that arose over the first two decades of the twenty-first century, especially after the 2008 financial crisis, with the purpose of eroding labor rights on an international…

The same water produces electricity twenty times over the course of a basin. But these very low costs do not translate into benefits for the people.

The need to reorganize global governance so as to make space for a growing  China has long been apparent. With the financial crisis of 2008, another demand emerged: the reshaping of capitalism itself. The Covid-19 pandemic represented a strategic moment…

Despite their numerical minority as individual voters, in electoral democracies the economic elite wield significant political power. Through their investment decisions, those who control a nation’s wealth and credit have significant influence over its pace of economic growth, the value…

In the age of climate emergency, the developmental drawbacks of being a primary goods exporter may intensify. Besides barriers to climbing the value chain on the world market, the economic cost of becoming the world’s stockyard is compounded by its…

Over the past two decades, Brazil has seen two great swings in its distribution of real national income. In the years between 2004 and 2014, the wage share increased progressively. This phenomenon faced severe political resistance. The momentous events of…

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

Credit in Brazil—and particularly consumer credit—is expensive, but ubiquitous. Exclusion from the credit market, where basic needs not covered by wages are increasingly financed, is now a threat to the very social reproduction of the working classes. Accordingly, the massive…

The 2008 financial crisis was an unprecedented demonstration of financialization in capitalism today. In the US, the collapse of real estate values revealed how formal credit channels—imagined as mechanisms of wealth creation—had brought unsustainable levels of household indebtedness down into…

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s campaign for his third term as Brazil’s president was defined by the idea of reconstruction. This encompassed both a political recovery from the antidemocratic reign of Jair Bolsonaro as well as the promise of reindustrialization…

In December 2023, Brazil began presiding over the G20. The one-year presidency, which will culminate in the annual summit being hosted in Rio de Janeiro in November 2024, is the third of four terms from the global South—following Indonesia in…

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…

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…

In April 2021, private investors gathered at B3, Brazil’s stock exchange, to bid for water concessions in Rio de Janeiro. The former capital city and its surrounding municipalities had been divided into four “concession blocks,” all of which were up…

Over the past two decades, Brazilian media and political discourse have exalted the uncontroversial success of a magical entity known as “agribusiness.” Closely associated with the rise of commodity exports such as soy, sugarcane, and corn, “agribusiness” has come to…

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva may have won last month’s presidential elections, but the strength of Bolsonarismo has been confirmed. In both houses of the National Congress, Bolsonarismo and its allies made gains, overcoming the traditional right wing. In the…

The recent victories of left parties across Latin America—most recently the election of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil—have prompted comparisons with the Pink Tide of the early 2000s. But with narrow margins of victory against far-right opponents,…

November 3, 2022

Analysis

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Will a Lula victory be better for the climate than anything that happens at COP27?

Earlier this month, Brazilians went to the polls in an election billed as the most momentous since democratization in 1985. Far-right president Jair Bolsonaro faced off against former two-term president Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva. Though Lula did win the…

The election of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018 commenced a long agenda of environmental destruction in Brazil. Before taking office, Bolsonaro had openly threatened Indigenous communities with racist attacks, commenting that Indigenous peoples should not have “an inch of land” and…

In recent months Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro appears to have shape-shifted. From a staunch ally of business interests, he now presents himself as a president of the poor. The basis of this transformation is his new conditional cash-transfer programme Auxilio…

Brazil's nearly 70-year-old national oil company, Petrobrás, faces criticism from across the political spectrum for its simultaneous price hikes and record breaking annual profits.

Frequent mass shootings and recurring political struggle over gun control measures are uniquely American social phenomena.

In The Takeover of Social Policy by Financialization, Lena Lavinas names the “Brazilian Paradox”: the model of social inclusion implemented by the Workers’ Party under President Lula and President Rousseff promotes a logic of financial inclusion and market incorporation, and…

Outside of Brazil, the Bolsa Familia is known as the hallmark social policy of the former President Lula and remains the world's largest conditional cash transfer program. Less well known is the history of Brazil's social policy in the early…

The deep divisions in American political and social life have long been thought to explain the unique weakness of America’s welfare infrastructure, and the absence of an integrated system of universal benefits. But on their own, demographic divisions need not…

Brazil's Bolsa Familia is widely credited with lifting more than 20 million people out of extreme poverty, making it a global model for anti-poverty initiatives. Developed as part of a broader theory of equitable development, it serves as the basis…