Eve E. Buckley’s study of twentieth-century Brazil examines the nation’s hard social realities through the history of science, focusing on the use of technology and engineering as vexed instruments of reform and economic development. Nowhere was the tension between technocratic optimism and entrenched inequality more evident than in the drought-ridden Northeast sertão, plagued by chronic poverty, recurrent famine, and mass migrations. Buckley reveals how the physicians, engineers, agronomists, and mid-level technocrats working for federal agencies to combat drought were pressured by politicians to seek out a technological magic bullet that would both end poverty and obviate the need for land redistribution to redress long-standing injustices.

Since the early 2000s, state-led and innovation-focused strategies have characterized the approach to development pursued in countries around the world, such as China, India, and South Korea. Brazil, the largest and most industrialized economy in Latin America, demonstrates both the opportunities and challenges of this approach. Over the course of nearly 20 years, the Brazilian government enacted various policies and programs designed to strengthen the country’s capacity to innovate. It increased spending on science and technology, encouraged greater collaboration between industry and universities, and fostered the creation of new institutions whose primary aim was to facilitate greater private research and development (R&D) spending. In this book, the editors unite a diverse array of empirical contributions around a few key themes, including public policies, institutions and innovation ecosystems, and firms and industries, that collectively make the case for a new, forward-looking innovation agenda aimed at addressing persistent challenges and exploiting emerging opportunities in Brazil. Its conclusions offer valuable lessons for other developing and emerging economies seeking to accelerate innovation and growth in the modern age. With its interdisciplinary and wide-ranging contribution to the study of innovation, as well as attention to broader policy implications, this book will appeal to scholars and professionals alike.

Brazil faces important issues as to whether and how socio-economic and political reforms will be pursued with urgency and staying power. This book presents a strong agenda and action plan to achieve for Brazil both economic growth and improved welfare for its citizens.

In this book, Rafael R. Ioris critically revisits the postwar context in Brazil to reexamine traditional questions and notions pertaining to the nature of Latin America’s political culture and institutions. It was in this period that the region lived some of its most intense and successful experiences of fast economic growth, which was paradoxically marred by heightened ideological divisions, political disruptions, and the emergence of widespread authoritarian rule. Combining original sources of political, diplomatic, intellectual, cultural, and labor histories, Ioris provides a comprehensive history of the fruitful debates concerning national development in postwar Brazil, a time when the so-called country of the future faced one of its best moments for consolidating political democracy and economic prosperity. He argues that traditional views on political instability have been excessively grounded on an institutional focus, which should be replaced by in-depth analysis of events on the ground. In so doing, he reveals that as national development meant very different things to multiple different social segments of the Brazilian society, no unified support could have been provided to the democratically elected political regime when things rapidly became socially and politically divisive early in the 1960s. Innovating in its multidimensional analytical scope and interdisciplinary focus, Transforming Brazil provides a rich political, cultural, and intellectual examination of a historical period characterized by rapid socio-economic changes amidst significant political instability and the heightened ideological polarization shaping the political scenario of Brazil and much of Latin America in the Cold War era.

In the last few decades, Brazilian agriculture has experienced a seismic transformation, and its contradictory facets have fed different and opposing narratives regarding recent changes. This book covers these changes, exploring the issues from several empirical and analytical angles, including the role of agriculture in the contemporary Brazilian economy, the dynamics of Brazilian agricultural value chains, environmental challenges and the processes of social differentiation. Brazilian agriculture continues to be viewed in the international literature, either through the lenses of the past century - those of former problems relating to land use and land tenure - or apologetically. This collection of essays aims at updating the current interpretations, providing objective accounting of the main transformations, its determinants, results, contradictions and limitations. As it covers the most relevant traits of Brazilian agricultural and rural development, the book will provide the reader with an encompassing view of contemporary Brazilian agriculture, including the positive and negative sides of the so-called tropical agriculture revolution. It highlights the tremendous economic potential as well as the continuing structural heterogeneity, concentration of production and marginalization of millions of small farmers. Written in an engaging and accessible style, this book will be perfect for all those interested in learning about Brazilian agriculture. It will be of particular interest to undergraduate and graduate students of economic development, agricultural economics, rural sociology, comparative economic development, rural development and agricultural policies.

Complementarities between political and economic institutions have kept Brazil in a low-level economic equilibrium since 1985.

In order to analyze Brazil's recent accumulation of capital in the light of its continued dependence, Peter Evans focuses on the relationships among multinational corporations, local private entrepreneurs, and state-owned enterprises that have developed in Brazil over the last decade. He argues that while relations among the three kinds of capital continue to be contradictory, a triple alliance has been formed that provides the social structural basis for the pattern of local industrialization that has emerged. The author begins with a review of the theories of imperialism and dependency in the third world. Placing the Brazilian experience of the last twenty years in its historical context, he traces the country's evolution from the period of "classic dependence" at the turn of the century to the current stage of "dependent development." In conclusion, Professor Evans discusses the implications of the Brazilian model for other third world countries. Examining the nature of the triple alliance as it is manifested in such industries as pharmaceuticals, textiles, and petrochemicals, the author reveals the complex differentiation of the groups' roles in industrialization and lays bare the grounds for their collaboration and their conflict. He consequently shows how the differing interests, power, and capabilities of the three groups have combined to produce a system promoting industrialization that benefits the elite partnership but excludes the larger population from the rewards of growth.