The Brazilian duality of Ignácio Rangel

ABSTRACT Brazilians dub the eighties “the lost decade”. After forty years of an average annual growth of 7%, the GDP per inhabitant dropped 5% in that decade. Ignácio Rangel, a Marxist economist, foresaw the coming of the crisis in 1978, and suggested the only way out: the privatization of the public utilities. That was before Reagan and Thatcher. The “Brazilian Duality” is the mainspring of Rangel’s thought. According to it, the national economy must be analysed from both its “internal side”, i.e., the national economy itself, and its “external side”, the world economy.