Historical experience of industrial policy in Brazil

ABSTRACT This paper studies the practice of industrial policy and the corresponding effort of institution building in Brazil from the 1930s to the 1970s. The argument is that, although that practice and the respective institutional organization succeeded in the structuring of Brazilian industry into a process of convergence towards the international industrial structure and technological development patterns up to the 1970s, they showed themselves not functional in catching up with the structural changes and the new technologies of the 1980s. The paper concludes by pointing that both the established practice of industrial policy and the related institutional organization led to a normative and institutional lock in which, together with the political inertia, hindered the necessary changes at the beginning of the 1980s.