Do not be misled by the title. Development administrators and scholars, rather than electric power technicians, will be the principal beneficiaries of Judith Tendler’s Electric Power in Brazil: Entrepreneurship in the Public Sector. And Latin American scholars can reap some of the study’s side benefits, because it explores in great depth the relationship of Brazil’s political and social realities to the solution of an apparently insoluble and crucial development dilemma.
As Albert O. Hirschman suggests in his glowing foreword, this is a microstudy of the development process, the sort of detailed monograph which will henceforth have to make the major contribution to our knowledge of economic development. The development dilemma was the chronic electric power shortage threatening Brazil’s postwar momentum. The electric power industry was mainly foreign owned. Inflation was sizeable and persistent. Powerful political pressures, including strong nationalistic opposition to foreign enterprise in the public utility field, prevented regulated power rates from rising along with the general price level. Thus the power industry was deterred from expanding both by the latent threat of nationalization and by the paucity of earnings as a source of investment resources.
Yet Brazil managed to sustain its industrial boom and overall high rates of expansion without nationalizing the entire power industry. As key Brazilian officials argued, buying out the foreign companies would use up scarce capital without increasing the total power capacity in the country. The complex, yet simple solution was for government to expand in the power sector as a producer, coexisting with the principal foreign utility.
The principal theme (and unique contribution) of the book is the role that technology played in permitting this solution, in which the industry as a whole was allowed to expand in spite of strong antagonism between the private and public sectors. State enterprises concentrated on power generation, while the foreign company remained dominant in power distribution. And Judith Tendler argues persuasively and in great detail that different technological and administrative characteristics of power generation and distribution permitted the modus vivendi.
The book is an elaboration of a doctoral dissertation based on extensive field work and residence in Brazil. It is an excellent study. It does focus, however, almost exclusively on the power situation in the industrial heartland of south central Brazil with virtually no attention given to the northeast, the south, or other important regions of the country. Also there is some noticeable repetition in the book, and a final summary chapter, with some attempt to extend the analysis into the future, would have been a valuable addition.
The relationship of technology and science to development is also the theme of a series of essays edited by Kalman H. Silvert under the title The Social Reality of Scientific Myth. Three of the essays, under the heading “Postulations,” consider broad topics: “Science and Institutional Change,” “War, Science and Social Change,” and “Language Rationalization and Scientific Progress.” Six case studies follow, including one by James W. Rowe on “Science and Politics in Brazil: Background of the 1967 Debate on Nuclear Energy Policy.” The Rowe essay explores a subject on which little has been written by social scientists. It is ambitious. It attempts to summarize in a short space the evolution of institutionalized science in Brazil, as well as to analyze the recent interaction between science and politics in the formulation of science policy.
The relatively short Rowe essay is admittedly incomplete. For example, it gives only passing attention to the development policy controversy extending over the last decade as to whether and when Brazil needed nuclear power capacity. The nuclear scientists argued for increased government support, insisting that Brazil needed nuclear power. Until recently, however, government officials in the electric power industry took the contrary position that nuclear power was not economically feasible as compared to alternative power sources.
