Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira

Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira
Bresser Pereira (cropped 2).jpg
Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira, Award Juca Pato 2015
Born (1934-06-30) 30 June 1934 (age 88)
São Paulo, Brazil
Academic career
InstitutionGetulio Vargas Foundation
School or
tradition
Development economics, Post-Keynesian macroeconomics
Alma materUniversity of São Paulo
InfluencesKarl Marx, Max Weber, John Maynard Keynes, John Kenneth Galbraith, Celso Furtado, Nicholas Kaldor, Ignácio Rangel
ContributionsInertial inflation, new developmentalism, technobureaucracy
AwardsEmeritus Professor, from Getulio Vargas Foundation (2005), Doctor Honoris Causa, from University of Buenos Aires (2010), James Street Scholar, from Association for Evolutionary Economics (2012)
Websitehttp://www.bresserpereira.org.br

Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira (born 30 June 1934) is a Brazilian economist and social scientist. He teaches at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, in São Paulo. Since 1981, he has been the editor of the Brazilian Journal of Political Economy.

Bresser-Pereira served as the Minister of Finance of Brazil in 1987, under the Presidency of José Sarney, and helped propose what would eventually become the Brady Plan which solved the country's foreign debt crisis. He also served as the Minister of Federal Administration and Reform from 1995 to 1998 and the Minister of Science and Technology in 1999. His career as an economist was largely focused on theoretical questions such as developmentalism, development macroeconomics, methodological critique of neoclassical economics, the theory of the democratic, social, and developmental state, and on the critique of neoliberalism. He also had an interest in applied questions relating to the economy of Brazil and its society.

Career

Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira was born in 1934 in São Paulo. His bachelor's degree was in Law from the University of São Paulo (1957); his MBA, from Michigan State University (1960); his PhD (1974) and his Livre Docência in Economics (1984), from the University of São Paulo. He taught at the Getulio Vargas Foundation from 1962. He was visiting professor at the (Pantheon-Sorbonne University)(1977), at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (2003-2010), and at the University of São Paulo (1989 and 2002–03). He was also visiting fellow at Nuffield College and St Antony's College, Oxford in 1999 and 2001.

From 1963 to 1982, while maintaining his academic roles, he was vice-president of Pão de Açucar Supermarkets (GPA (company)j which by 1982 had become the largest retail chain in Brazil. In 1983, when Brazil was beginning to democratize, he entered public life, first as president of the Bank of the State of São Paulo (1983–84). In 1985 and 1986, he was chief of staff of the governor of São Paulo, André Franco Montoro. In 1987, he became Finance Minister of Brazil in the José Sarney administration. After leaving the ministry, he was a founder-member of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party - PSDB. Between 1995 and 1998, he was Minister of Federal Administration and Reform of the State and, in 1999, Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation, both under the Fernando Henrique Cardoso administration. After 1999 he returned full-time to academia. In 2010 he left the PSDB, arguing that the political party had turned conservative.

As Finance Minister (1987)

In 1987 he took over the Ministry of Finance (Brazil) at a moment of deep crisis that followed the failure of the Cruzado Plan: inflation reached 15% a month, while both firms and Brazil’s states went bankrupt. Negotiations with IMF and the fiscal adjustments that these would entail were seen by the politicians in power as unacceptable. Nevertheless, Bresser prepared a "Macroeconomic Adjustment Plan", which included measures necessary to control inflation. Second, he prepared and adopted what came to be known as the "Bresser Plan", that was not ultimately successful.

Third, he developed a plan based on the securitization of foreign debt, based on the measures New York City had taken to bring its debt under control in the 1970s. This approach would have largely excluded commercial banks and IMF, but it was rejected by the U.S. secretary of the Treasury, James Baker. Nevertheless 18 months later, it was taken up by Baker’s successor, Nicholas F. Brady, and it was the Brady Plan that brought Brazil’s foreign debt crisis to a close.

As Minister of Federal Administration and Reform of the State (MARE) (1995-98)

With the election of Fernando Henrique Cardoso to the presidency of Brazil, Bresser-Pereira took charge at the Ministry of Federal Administration and Reform of the State (MARE). He developed a white paper, the "Plano Diretor da Reforma do Aparelho do Estado" which offered a theoretical framework for public sector reform based on managerial principles. These included management by results, competition for excellence between state organizations, a formal system of social accountability and the creation of "social organizations" – non-profit organizations to which the state should transfer its large social and scientific responsibilities since these did not need to involve the use of state power. He also proposed an amendment to the chapter on public administration contained in the 1988 Constitution. This managerial reform of the Brazilian state has continued since his period of office, while a large number of social organizations continue to be created. The 1999 Brazilian reforms led by Bresser-Pereira became an international benchmark of their type. The books and papers that Bresser-Pereira wrote on the subject turned the main element in the courses on public administration offered by the Brazilian universities. Several Master and PhD dissertations have been written on the reform. While in MARE, Bresser-Pereira was also president of es:Centro Latinoamericano de Administración para el Desarrollo - CLAD between 1995 and 1997. In his term, he gave to the managerial reform a Latin American dimension, and with the same objective, he organized the first yearly congress of CLAD, which is today CLAD's key activity.

As Minister of Science and Technology (1999)

In the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (Brazil) Bresser-Pereira defined the policy of transforming the research funds originated from the state-owned enterprises recently privatized into Sectorial Funds attached to the National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development (FNDCT). In order to achieve a better integration between the Ministry and its main agency, National Council for Scientific and Technological Development - CNPq, that he also presided it. Bresser-Pereira unified the academic curriculum vitae (CV) that the Federal Government requires for the evaluation of researchers under the name of Lattes Platform.

Academic Work

He teaches economics at Getulio Vargas Foundation since 1962, where he became Emeritus Professor in 2005. In 1996 created in the Foundation, in São Paulo, the first master program on business administration in Brazil. He founded and is the editor of the Revista de Economia Política / Brazilian Journal of Political Economy since 1981. He is frequent contributor to newspapers, particularly to Folha de S.Paulo. His mains contributions on economic theory are the historical model of growth and distribution with three types of technical progress, the theory of the inertial inflation, the methodological critique to neoclassical economics, and the theories and models forming new developmentalism and developmental macroeconomics. In political and social theory he worked on the rise of the technobureaucratic or professional class, on the theory of the modern state, and on the relation between democracy and economic development or the capitalist revolution. Since 2001 he is involved in defining new developmentalism – an ambitious project involving a macroeconomics, a political economy, and the draft of a microeconomics.

Selected books

Bresser-Pereira has a large number of papers public in journals and edited books.

Selected papers (not republished in the books)

  • Bresser-Pereira, Luiz Carlos (1982[1984]) "Six interpretations on the Brazilian social formation", Latin American Perspectives 11(1): 35–72, Winter 1984.
  • Bresser-Pereira, Luiz Carlos (2002) "Citizenship and res publica: the emergence of republican rights", Citizenship Studies 6(2) 2002: 145–164.
  • Bresser-Pereira, Luiz Carlos (2009) "The two methods and the hard core of economics", Journal of Post Keynesian Economics 31 (3) Spring: 493–522.
  • Bresser-Pereira, Luiz Carlos (2010) "The global financial crisis, neoclassical economics, and the neoliberal years of capitalism", Revue de la Régulation 7, Spring 2010: 1-29.
  • Bresser-Pereira (2011) "From the national-bourgeoisie to the dependency interpretation of Latin America", Latin American Perspectives 178, vol. 38 (3), May 2011: 40–58.
  • Bresser-Pereira, Luiz Carlos (2012) "Democracy and capitalist revolution", Économie Appliquée 65 (4): 111–139.

Books on his academic work

  • Em Busca do Novo [In Search of the New], edited by Yoshiak Nakano, Furquim and José Marcio Rego, Rio de Janeiro: Editora da Fundação Getulio Vargas, 2005. ISBN 85-225-0497-0.
  • A Teoria Econômica na Obra de Bresser-Pereira [Economic Theory on the Work of Bresser-Pereira], edited by José Luis Oreiro, Luiz Fernando de Paula and Nelson Marconi. Santa Maria, RS: Editora da UFSM, 2015. ISBN 9788573912296.
  • Citations in Google Scholar: 22161

Additional papers on Bresser-Pereira's academic work are in his website: http://www.bresserpereira.org.br.

Honors and distinctions

Sites


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