The Impacts of Commercial Liberalization on the Brazilian External Trade Pattern

ABSTRACT This paper analyses the main effects of the Brazilian trade liberalization on the technical efficiency of the manufacturing industry and the trade pattern. The principal empirical findings suggest the following results for the 1990’s: i) expressive gains in labor productivity and reduction of the average real costs for most sectors of the manufacturing industry between 1988 and 1998; ii) the trade pattern were mostly driven by import changes; iii) on average, industries which showed the greatest gains in technical efficiency did not translated them into competitiveness gains in the global markets; and iv) on average, there were dynamic efficiency losses once, on the first hand, major gains in international competitiveness were located in the traditional sectors and, on the other hand, industries that made the major investments in Research and Development (R & D) were the same that had significant sectoral trade deficits throughout the 1990’s.