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The state and financialization in Brazil: macroeconomic interdependencies and structural limits preventing development

Abstract

The understanding of the relationships between the state and the economy is a necessary step in analyzing the conditions of the main issues blocking Brazilian development. The regime of economic growth that emerged from the structural transformations of the 1990s, and survives to the present date, is characterized by its low dynamism and recurrent conjunctural instabilities. Recent studies rank it among the finance-dominated regimes due to the external situation and the current economic policy, whether assuming a financial-led growth regime, or expressing a pattern that might be termed finance-blocked growth. However, these regimes can only exist by reproducing their institutional links with the state, by subordination to the objectives of financial revaluation and rentier capital. As a consequence, they reduce the autonomy of economic policy, restrict the political conditions for the construction of the social state and end up reducing legitimacy of public interventions for development. This article uses the concepts of institutional forms and of the fiscal-financial regime to analyze this problem.

Keywords:
Financialization; State-economy relations; Capital accumulation; Economic policy; Social and economic development

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