It has become the mark of a modern state, whether newly independent or old but industrially backward, that it should adopt elaborately conceived plans for the rational use and development of its resources. Daland is under no illusions about the success of most such efforts or even about the relevance of planning to the development process. He has chosen to study Brazil’s essays in this field because Brazil has had “a twenty-year history of conscious, institutionalized central planning,” because it is one of the countries “that seem to have managed a lively economic growth without effective planning as a major cause,” and because, in spite of this lack of success, “Brazilians are developing planning approaches at national, regional, state, and local levels” (pp. 1-2).
He begins with a brief account of Brazil’s political history since the founding of the republic in 1889, giving due emphasis to the rise and fall of Getúlio Vargas and the early planning efforts of the first Vargas administration, the Estado Nôvo. He then proceeds to a more detailed and comparative examination of the substance of the major plans which Brazil has adopted—the SALTE Plan of the 1940s, the establishment of the National Development Bank, and the Plano Trienal of the sixties. In fact it might be argued that Brazil’s first flirtation with government planning antedated these efforts and may be recognized in the modernization of the city of Rio de Janeiro by Pereira Passos at the turn of the century. Certainly when Kubitschek created Brasília and its satellite towns he had a precedent in the laying out of Belo Horizonte as the new capital of Minas Gerais during the early nineteenth century. Daland does not allude to these, but he correctly emphasizes the influence of political pressures in carrying out technically conceived economic planning. He points out a striking constant: “The amount of governmental participation in the economy, in the name of planning for development, has increased with every recent administration” (p. 206). He discusses the reasons for this, although he fails to note that the tradition of governmental control of the economy goes back to colonial times. Also any weakening of the imperial government’s grip on the economy resulted from the strength of provincial political groups too isolated by poor communications for effective coercion by the central authority.
Daland reaches the end of his study with the conclusion that, although governmental planning has brought benefits to Brazil, it cannot be credited with any real contribution to Brazil’s economic growth. The preparation of plans and the creation of agencies to implement them have introduced Brazilians to many modern concepts of government and to modern methods for confronting the problems of economic growth. But it is obvious that Daland joins the many Brazilians and the foreign students of Brazil who hold the belief that Brazil has grown and will continue to grow in spite of its politicians, its theoreticians, and even its economic planners.
