September 26, 2024
AnalysisPeripheral Conditionalities
A new dependency theory?
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…
September 12, 2024
AnalysisIndustry Preference
The incompatibility between the Workers’ Party program and the business lobby lay behind Dilma’s impeachment. Does Bolsonaro alter the calculus?
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…
August 21, 2024
AnalysisThe World’s Stockyard
Agribusiness and the green transition in Brazil
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…
August 8, 2024
AnalysisThe Political Economy of Brazilian Inflation
The implicit income policy of central bank inflation targeting
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…
July 17, 2024
AnalysisWhy 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.
April 25, 2024
AnalysisDesenrola Brazil
Debt management as social policy under Lula 3
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…
April 3, 2024
AnalysisThe Debt Poor
Financialization, debt and the underestimation of poverty in Brazil
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…
March 7, 2024
InterviewsPetrobras in Transition
An interview with Cibele Vieira of the Oil Workers’ Federation of Brazil
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…
February 24, 2024
AnalysisThe G20 in the South
The Brazilian Presidency in 2024
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…
November 18, 2023
InterviewsRules 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
AnalysisThe 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…
August 10, 2023
AnalysisElusive Boundaries
The politics of public-private relations in Brazilian water provision
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…
August 5, 2023
AnalysisThe Agribusiness Pact
The “reprimarization” of the Brazilian economy
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…
December 3, 2022
AnalysisRealignments
Bolsonarismo and Brazil’s shifting middle-class vote
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…
November 30, 2022
InterviewsBittersweet Tides
Chile, Brazil, and the future of the Latin American Left
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,…
Domestic Politics & Planetary Change
Will a Lula victory be better for the climate than anything that happens at COP27?
Will a Lula victory be better for the climate than anything that happens at COP27?
October 26, 2022
AnalysisTown & City
Reading Brazil’s first round election results
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…
May 28, 2022
AnalysisFarmland Assets
International finance and the transformation of Brazil’s agricultural lands
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…
May 14, 2022
AnalysisPersisting Paternalisms
The Auxilio Brasil in perspective
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…
March 26, 2022
SourcesBrazil'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.
March 27, 2021
SourcesFrequent mass shootings and recurring political struggle over gun control measures are uniquely American social phenomena.
March 19, 2021
InterviewsParty Politics and Social Policy
A conversation between Lena Lavinas, André Singer, and Barbara Weinstein on three decades of party politics and social policy in Brazil.
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…
January 23, 2021
SourcesOutside 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…
January 9, 2021
SourcesThe 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…