Brazil's dilemma: Dependency, debt, and democracy. (Volumes I and II).
Item
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Title
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Brazil's dilemma: Dependency, debt, and democracy. (Volumes I and II).
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Identifier
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AAI9009773
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identifier
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9009773
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Creator
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Rocha, Geisa Maria.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Kenneth Paul Erickson
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Date
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1989
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Political Science, General
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Abstract
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The proponents of developmentalism--the perspective headquartered at international lending institutions and favored by commercial bank and government creditors as well as by many policy-makers in debtor countries--are recommending the same package of orthodox stabilization programs and liberalizing, free-market oriented "structural reforms" of the 1960s as the solution to the foreign debt crisis of the 1980s in Latin America and elsewhere in the Third World. In their view, the lost decade is the direct result of governments' deviation from "wise" economic policies in the past, not of the developmental choices made, hence the advisability of continuing unchanged along the same course.;Arguing the contrary, i.e. that the policies prescribed by developmentalism were eagerly endorsed and efficiently implemented in Latin America in the last two decades, this dissertation analyses the Brazilian "model" in order to show that the socio-economic crisis of the 1980s there was created by the pursuance of the very policies recommended by the perspective: integration of the economy into the financial and productive global system and external reliance on flows of capital, particularly flows of loans, for the supposedly rapid local replication of the capitalist development in the center--the major theoretical assumption of developmentalism.;The crisis of the 1980s challenges developmentalism's assumptions and brings new support to the dependency approach which shows in a historical-structural fashion that the growth strategy based on external reliance on flows of capital entails heavy economic, political and social costs and will not enable Latin America to replicate, in the long-term, the historical pattern of capitalist development in the West. The empirical investigation of the Brazilian case, contrary to the critiques of the dependency approach, did verify its major propositions: the inherent vulnerability of the externally conditioned growth model adopted and the serve constraints on state autonomy over crucial policy decisions for development since they conflict with the global priorities of international capital.;This study suggests that the growth strategy formulated by developmentalism for the replication process and the concrete policies prescribed to achieve this goal constitute the major obstacle to the capitalist development of Brazil and, hence, to the establishment of a stable bourgeois democratic society.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
