Abstract
Narratives of economic miracles have been structured by a story engine, or a source of tension capable of organizing the unfolding of a narrative over time in relation to context, protagonists, and outcome—in particular, the nature and scope of the social, economic, and political transformations engendered by the acceleration of economic growth. This essay explores the possible story engines of the economic miracle engineered by the military regime that governed Brazil from 1964 to 1985. It argues that the main narrative engine employed by the Brazilian government—the emergence of the state as a technocratic collector and allocator of finite resources—was supported by the global rise of the politics of scarcity cum politics of productivity after World War II. This narrative engine, however, sought to conceal the empirical engine of the milagre: the consolidation of forms of concentration that endorsed the authoritarian nature of the Brazilian developmental state.
The Brazilian economic miracle has remained at the core of analyses of the military regime that governed the country from 1964 to 1985. Even today, many of those who lived through the period of the milagre place the social and economic transformations the country underwent in the late 1960s and early 1970s at the center of their lived experiences under the regime. Economic historians have sought to unveil the magnitude of this transformation with recourse to macroeconomic indicators that we have made a conspicuous part of the knowledge infrastructure mobilized for knowing the economy.1 During the years from 1968 to 1973, the period commonly associated with the Brazilian milagre, the Brazilian economy grew at an average annual rate of 11.1 percent of the GDP, against 4.2 percent in the four preceding years. It was not the first time the Brazilian economy had presented impressive growth rates. During the elected presidency of Juscelino Kubitschek (1956–61), the Brazilian economy grew by about 50 percent of the GDP and 60 percent of industrial production; inflation, however, grew from 11.8 percent in 1955 to 25.4 percent in 1960, alongside a rising balance of payment deficits and debt burden.2 The period of the milagre witnessed for the first time accelerated growth with lower inflation rates (from 25.5 percent in 1968 to 15.6 percent in 1973) and significant balance of payment surpluses (at an average of US$1.1 billion per year between 1968 and 1973), which lowered the ratio of net foreign debt to exports from 2 in 1968 to 1.4 in 1973.3 The period seems even more impressive if we observe that by late 1963, inflation had risen to 80 percent and GDP growth had shrunk to 0.6 percent from 6.6 percent in 1962.4
Despite their apparent inherent significance due to their contemporary centrality to assessments of economic performance, numbers are performative instruments that by themselves cannot support narratives of economic miracles without recourse to what Tiago Mata has called a story’s “engine,” or a source of tension capable of organizing the unfolding of the narrative over time in relation to context, protagonists, and outcome.5 Narratives of economic miracles have been built on engines mobilized when these transformations took place and later to reinterpret these processes. Jason Petrulis has noted how the narrative of a South Korean miracle was mobilized to support economists’ and policymakers’ attempts to reify “universalist claims of development economics” while highlighting that today’s preferred engine ties the miracle to Koreans’ behavior. Despite the differences between these two narrative engines, Petrulis suggests that they both left unexplored the costs of accelerated industrialization under an authoritarian regime.6 The South Korean and the Brazilian economic miracles have clear parallels, not least in the fact that they unfolded in underdeveloped countries under authoritarian regimes that mobilized technical experts to promote an account of technocratic state management of the economy. Still, these similarities do not presuppose that the proliferation of economic miracle narratives after World War II was predicated on the diffusion of convergent engines, nor do they explain how the unequal distribution of the costs and benefits of the socioeconomic transformations has remained a secondary—or entirely omitted—part of the narrative. What, then, was the story engine of the Brazilian economic miracle?
We can start by defining what a miracle may entail, and consider whether it may be the realization of the unexpected. An economic miracle was and is primarily seen as the process of acceleration of economic growth, and there was a time when continuous economic growth was not to be expected.7 Until the 1930s, the business cycle theory tied the expectation of growth to an ensuing period of economic stagnation.8 The experience of uninterrupted, self-sustained economic growth was then an anomalous phenomenon and, as Timothy Mitchell has noted, a “potentially destabilizing force.”9 By the 1950s, however, uninterrupted and—in developed countries—self-sustained growth was not only the central component of state action in the economic sphere but an expected means and outcome of the development process as established by development and growth economists.10 A key epistemological transformation facilitated this transition. The production and diffusion of universalist theories of development anchored in the expectation of a takeoff toward steady economic expansion, along with the widespread adoption of the United Nations’ 1953 System of National Accounts, helped establish contemporary attempts at quantifying economic growth—such as national income, GNP, and GDP—as what Daniel Speich, following Bruno Latour, has termed “inscription devices” that help economic actors govern the uncertainty connected with a future of continuous growth.11 At the time of the Brazilian miracle, economic growth was not an unexpected process but rather an anticipated result of state-led action that could be quantified in stable inscriptions of the national economy.
If not the unexpected, the Brazilian economic miracle could have been the realization of the unpredictable. Here, the key self-proclaimed Brazilian technocrats behind the economic miracle would categorically state that if the miracle was the realization of the unpredictable then there had been no miracle. This was the opinion of the Brazilian minister of the treasury Antônio Delfim Netto (1967–74).12 For the minister of planning João Paulo dos Reis Velloso (1969–79) as well, it made “no sense to talk about a Brazilian miracle” as a rupture with the past or as a process unexpected or unpredicted.13 Re-created by the military regime in 1964, the Ministry of Planning was the technocratic institution charged with designing the country’s development strategy. Velloso’s assessment of the Brazilian experience in 1973 seems to contradict his earlier statement that, given the scarce resources at the disposal of his ministry, promoting development felt “‘almost like producing a miracle.’”14 But here the miracle was not the realization of the unpredictable but an effort to prepare the correct interpretation of possible economic futures presented as an “as if” narrative in a development plan, a reasoning device capable of articulating what could happen through careful and realistic planning.15 Thus Velloso, a thirty-eight-year-old economist who had studied at Yale, sought to present himself not as a “saint who performs miracles” but as a technocrat who “believes that work—if not faith—indeed moves mountains.”16 Velloso and his ministry are products of what Mitchell has called “economentality”—the systematic inclusion of the future into government through economic policymaking, a process that eventually allowed the state to discipline and govern the potentially destabilizing expectations of future economic expansion, not least through planning.17 Planners such as Velloso therefore capitalized on the elusive distinction between predictions, projections, estimates, and targets to offer “a view of the performance of the Brazilian economy” that helped support the economic policy of the military regime.18 It should not be surprising that Velloso rose to prominence after he had publicly contested the “pessimistic projections” made by the futurologist Herman Kahn about Brazil’s future in his 1967 book The Year 2000, in particular his estimates of the country’s national income per capita by 2000.19 Framing the miracle as a predictable, state-led process of economic engineering helped dissociate it from Brazil’s subsequent experiences with economic stagnation and recession during the latter years of the military regime.
The rise of economentality as a dimension of governmentality, and the recourse to techniques of futurity to discipline collective expectations and buttress the legitimacy of the regime—whose authority in economic affairs had been challenged in 1967 after a stabilization program led to a recession20—thus meant forfeiting the narrative engine of the unpredictable. Could the Brazilian experience have been structured by a story engine that presented the miracle as a feat of wonder, a process that surpassed expectations of what was then seen as possible? To answer this question, we must explore how contemporaries presented the conditions for accelerated economic growth in underdeveloped countries. Development and growth economics tied the conditions for economic expansion in the 1950s and 1960s to what Mauro Boianovsky has termed “capital fundamentalism.”21 This was the premise that development was predicated on capital accumulation, as expressed in the often-quoted contention by the development economist Arthur Lewis that for development to occur in underdeveloped countries, 10 percent to 15 percent of national income should be allocated toward investment.
Rather than a simple accounting exercise, however, capital fundamentalism depended on an epistemological transformation of how contemporaries conceived capital accumulation and the strategies they employed to measure it. In the early twentieth century, capital accumulation had been assessed through long-term changes in a country’s stock of assets as measured in estimates of national wealth.22 The diffusion of national accounting after World War II, however, made possible the short-term assessment of capital accumulation by equating it with national savings, which was then understood as the accounting difference between what was produced and what was consumed by a country in a given year. Because savings should be allocated as investment to expand the stock of physical capital of a country to support development, growth required the expansion of aggregate production beyond aggregate consumption levels. After World War II, this was a goal made possible by the establishment of national income, GNP, and GDP as tools of short-term economic management rather than as indices of economic welfare—or as indicators of an economy’s capacity to respond to the demands of society.
National income estimates were initially envisioned in the early 1930s by the Russian-American economist Simon Kuznets as a measure of a population’s economic welfare rather than an economy’s “short-term productive capacity.”23 However, Kuznets’s mobilization of the accounting framework to assess a country’s “economic potential” for production during World War II, and the subsequent diffusion of national accounting, eventually led the economist to recognize, in 1972, the potential of GDP for measuring “short-term changes in current economic performance” of a country.24 Consequently, if accelerated growth required accelerated savings, this could be achieved in the short run by expanding production and promoting saving as a goal of economic policymaking. The Brazilian military government was not oblivious to the relationship between capital accumulation and economic growth; besides sponsoring the rise of aggregate production, the regime established compulsory savings programs administered by state agencies, thus helping the state channel savings toward investment in strategic economic sectors.25 In this sense, the miracle was the realization of the possible as engineered by the state.
Perhaps, then, the miracle’s narrative engine could be traced to the unfolding of an empirically observable phenomenon that defied rational explanation or required further decoding. A particularity of the Brazilian milagre in this sense was the government’s capacity to produce high rates of economic growth while also reducing inflation, therefore challenging the short-run Phillips curve. Successive governments since the early 1960s experimented with unsuccessful stabilization programs centered around orthodox monetary and fiscal policies that led to a drastic reduction of economic activity and eventually to workers’ striking against the rising cost of living and the reduction of their wages’ purchasing power. Throughout the decade, the efficiency of economic policies to control inflation became a common barometer of the government’s capacity to manage the economy. Together with Treasury Minister Delfim Netto’s conviction that growth required reducing rising prices,26 the government placed the goal of controlling inflation at the center of economic policymaking after 1969.27
In the United States and Western Europe in the preceding decades, growth had been the response policymakers had provided to what had been identified as one of the central causes of inflation—the wage-price spiral, or the argument that rising wages above productivity gains supported the expansion of artificial demand that pressured prices upward.28 As Charles Maier has expertly demonstrated, in the United States during the 1930s and after World War II, there emerged a shared confidence in the capacity of economic growth to provide a solution to class and distributional conflicts resulting from scarcity produced by unbounded (or unplanned) economic expansion.29 This gave rise to what Maier has termed the “politics of productivity,” the claim that the expansion of productivity as the basis of economic growth would be responsible for raising standards of living.30 Therefore, rather than raising wage levels to promote welfare, the politics of productivity established that wage gains would be a consequence of society’s capacity to increase output and efficiency of production, which would then support self-sustained economic growth. Planning thus emerged as an apolitical instrument “towards productive efficiency,”31 one that privileged short-term political horizons amenable to narratives of economic miracle. The United States’ goal of exporting the politics of productivity as part of its strategy of international economic governance was then bolstered by the postwar experience with economic miracles first in Germany and then in Japan, which had been engineered by US governments as accumulators of capital following the American tenets of the politics of productivity.32 Abundance turned into an engineering challenge rather than a political outcome of class conflict, and again Germany and Japan served as successful cases of how the politics of productivity converted questions of domestic politics—concerned with resource allocation, distributional conflicts, the design of political institutions, and the configuration of political competition—into questions of output and efficiency, supported by the reality of rising productivity and economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s.33
The Brazilian economic miracle was grounded on a local version of the politics of productivity mobilized to solve the inflation-growth conundrum.34 The public debate among economists connected with the government about the causes of inflation—whether it resulted from artificial demand or rising production costs35—concealed the fact that both diagnoses were anchored in an emerging “politics of scarcity” as the necessary companion to the politics of productivity, a process anticipated by Maier when he noted how the latter provided “a substitute for harsh questions of allocation.”36 Thus, when Delfim Netto gave a speech to the commercial class in São Paulo in 1969, he articulated the basis of technocratic policymaking as the public man’s responsibility to act according to the principles of realism and rationality; while the former required realizing that resources were finite and scarce, the latter suggested a strategy to apply these resources without imposing further sacrifices on the population.37 The politics of productivity therefore helped displace an earlier narrative in which abundance was a precondition of economic expansion based on the availability of natural resources, and advanced an alternative narrative according to which abundance is the expected outcome of the state’s capacity to engineer efficient allocation of finite resources.
The convergence of the politics of scarcity with the politics of productivity then provided Brazilian economists with a solution to the inflation-growth conundrum: shifting the costs of monetary and fiscal adjustment to the working class in the form of a new wage policy that should solve, according to the military regime, the challenges presented by labor legislation for controlling inflation. According to the economist Mario Henrique Simonsen, the designer of the new policy implemented in 1965, demands for rising wages would be addressed through a simple “arithmetic calculation” that freed the government and business from the pressure posed by organized labor, since wages would now be adjusted according to an index of expected inflation called correção monetária, or monetary adjustment.38 As a result, real wages in 1967 were 71.9 percent of real wages in 1964.39 Though the military regime in 1968 implemented a new wage formula as an attempt to support growth of demand, the period 1967–73 saw a reduction or stagnation of real minimum wage despite economic growth and rising productivity.40 Even though skilled workers saw above-average wage increases, in general, wages did not benefit from the expansion of production and productivity, and the state’s priority remained to support high levels of investment and profit.41 Thus the authoritarian nature of the regime allowed the federal government to unilaterally solve the distributive conflict resulting from inflation control policies, thence endorsing the politics of scarcity cum politics of productivity.42
The administration of Emílio Garrastazu Médici (1969–74) mobilized the narrative of an economic milagre to identify the period with previous experiences in Germany, Japan, and South Korea.43 In this process, the politics of scarcity cum politics of productivity was indeed recognized and mobilized by contemporaries as a story engine of the Brazilian narrative. It was therefore with recourse to “the coefficients of productivity” that Delfim Netto justified his prediction in early 1973 that wages would incorporate the benefits of growth.44 This widespread narrative engine was adopted even by those who resisted the effects of the regime’s economic policies. In late 1973 an organization of industrial workers published its own report on productivity in the steel industry as part of national conferences to “provide knowledge about the socio-economic reality of the several sectors that form this category [of workers].”45 The report mobilized annual indices of productivity—measured as the number of ingots produced per the number of workers in the industry—to argue that an increase in productivity of 30 percent between 1968 and 1972 had not translated into wage increases, and thus lending support to strikes in the sector.46
This story engine supported a narrative of economic miracle as the multiplication of scarce resources in the Brazilian case. This narrative framed the authoritarian state as an institution that engineered plenty by addressing the threat of scarcity through the technocratic allocation of resources.47 It should therefore be unsurprising to see how this narrative of the rise of the developmental state in Brazil seemed to endorse the authoritarian institutions that the military regime had put in place to concentrate capacity and the authority to collect and allocate resources at the local and national levels. The military regime had prohibited the Brazilian Parliament from raising expenditures during the discussion of the budget and endowed the federal executive with control over public expenditure and the mechanisms to finance it; these prerogatives were later expanded to include concentration of tax power at the expense of the state and municipal units of the federation.48
These authoritarian reforms situated the federal government as the only authorized resource collector and allocator, prerogatives expanded by its capacity to set price and tax rate controls and distribute subsidies, and fostered by its emergence as the central promoter of savings and of investment in the private sector, making the latter increasingly more dependent on incentives and subsidies provided by the state.49 Indeed, the role of the state as the main collector and allocator of resources was early on enshrined in the re-creation of the Ministry of Planning and Economic Coordination in 1964 and recognized by its technocratic spokesmen, who identified the main function of the government’s involvement in the economy to be the distribution of resources and the implementation of policy priorities through a system of incentives, rather than the adoption of restrictive legislation.50 Coordination was then a necessary function of the reality of the politics of scarcity cum productivity. Because of the recognized trade-off between consumption and production, which had been made visible through national accounting,51 the new technocratic developmental state should coordinate the divergent “interests of producers and consumers” by, for example, establishing price tables that determined the rate of profit for producers and the costs of goods for consumers.52 Similarly, the new wage policy could then be presented not as a policy that shifted the costs of stabilization onto workers, but as a technical decision that sought to reduce collective uncertainty caused by inflation—or at least the expectation of inflation—thus helping channel savings through the financial system to finance public spending and private investment in order to support capital accumulation. Critics of the regime would sarcastically remark that the true miracle would have been if the miracle had not happened under such circumstances.53
The transformation of economic growth into a key metric of “temporal change”54 supporting assessments of economic performance that have endorsed narratives of economic miracles thus relied on normalizing expectations that the national economy should be the object of state-led technocratic management. This enabled the government to coordinate the competing claims of business, labor, and capital to ensure a constant expansion of aggregate output in the face of scarce and finite resources, thus realizing the promises of the developmental state.55 But these promises were predicated on the argument that economic growth, through increasing productivity, would support rising living standards. Even before steelworkers contested the truth claim of these promises, the 1970 census revealed rising income concentration and inequality by showing that the income of the richest 20 percent had grown by about 67 percent during the previous decade, whereas the income of the poorest 10 percent had grown by only 28 percent. Numbers for changes in relative income, however, told a much grimmer story: whereas the relative income of the richest 10 percent had grown by 22 percent during the same period, the relative income of the poorest 10 percent had shrunk by 13 percent. Changes in the distribution of the national income again corroborated the pessimistic conclusion that growth had not raised living standards for all, as only the richest 10 percent had seen a growth in their participation in national income, which reached 47.8 percent in 1970.56
Income concentration might have been the result of reforms implemented in the first years of the military regime, but rising inequality was a consequence of the very miracle often touted by contemporaries.57 In newspaper articles censored in Brazil, the international press remarked how “workers are not sharing in the growth experienced by the country” and highlighted—often with numbers from the 1970 census—how Brazil’s “admirable economic miracle” had favored the rich.58 Responding to criticisms, the government’s self-proclaimed technocrats would argue that continuous economic growth depended on the government’s capacity to resist adopting policies of redistribution.59 The young Brazilian economist the government appointed to provide a technical justification for income concentration would explain that to better distribute income it would be necessary to “sacrifice” (future) economic growth to “transfer” to the population part of what was then allocated as investment, an unfeasible option given the government’s unwillingness to renounce high rates of growth. Carlos Langoni, a recent graduate from the University of Chicago, argued that rising inequality was the necessary by-product of development in its first stages, when the government had to choose between investment in the expansion of physical capital (as advocated by development economists) and investment in education—and thus opted for the former.60
While it unfolded, the Brazilian experience was framed as a conviction narrative that sought to mobilize people to act in an uncertain world out of their belief in the truth content of the milagre.61 Maier notes that the politics of productivity was supported by the empirical reality of rising productivity and prosperity.62 In Brazil, the lived experience of an economic miracle was epitomized by changing consumption patterns among certain groups. Frank Trentmann has pointed out how stories of boom are tied to experiences of consumption—thus presenting the material justification of witnessing a miracle and believing in one.63 For contemporaries, the Brazilian economic miracle was one of rising consumption that unraveled not in spite of income concentration but because of growing inequality. Whereas Brazilian structuralists had argued that accelerated economic growth was impossible without structural transformations of Brazilian society to expand the internal market, income concentration, as engineered by a technocratic developmental state, supported the rise of a middle class capable of acquiring goods of high aggregate value provided by the leading sectors of the Brazilian miracle.64 Concentration—of income, capital, expertise, and political power—was thus the empirical (rather than the narrative) engine of the Brazilian experience.
As a narrative of conviction, the Brazilian economic miracle mobilized as a story engine the emergence of a technocratic developmental state capable of engineering abundance in a world of scarcity through the technical collection and allocation of resources to define, plan, and implement the empirical realities of the milagre. Adopting this story engine as a descriptor of the transformations the country experienced in the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, leads us to miss the opportunity to heed Petrulis’s warning about the costs of accelerated economic transformations under an authoritarian regime. Rather than corroborating the picture of the Brazilian state as an impartial technical manager of the economy, as the state tried to claim during the milagre, we should reframe the narrative of economic miracle as a strategic form of governmentality that sought to justify increasingly authoritarian forms of concentration in service of the contemporary universalist paradigm of development as accelerated economic growth. The association of miracle narratives with profound transformations in the nature of the state and its instruments of governance over society thus helps us understand why these stories seemed to have traveled easily in the decades following World War II amid rising inequality and political violence and instability. It may also allow us to explore whether we will see new narratives of miracles emerge as tools of governmentality in response to the environmental governance challenges we currently face.
I would like to thank Enrico Recco for his research assistance for this essay and Oto Montagner for his invaluable feedback. All errors are my own.
Notes
Mitchell, “Economentality”; Angeletti, “La formation de l’économie française”; Desrosières, “Managing the Economy.”
Mesquita, “Inflação, estagnação e ruptura.”
Mesquita, “Inflação, estagnação e ruptura.”
On growth, see, for example, Borowy and Schmelzer, History of the Future of Economic Growth; Schmelzer, Hegemony of Growth; Collins, More; Yarrow, Measuring America; O’Bryan, Growth Idea; Cook, Pricing of Progress; Macekura, Mismeasure of Progress; and Bivar, “Historicizing Economic Growth.”
Mitchell, “Economentality,” 497. During the interwar years, economic growth remained secondary to the adoption of stabilization programs in countries attempting to rise in the contemporary ethnoracial international hierarchy supported by the League of Nations. Jóhannesson, “Engineering the Economy through Austerity.”
See, for example, Alacevich, “Birth of Development Economics”; Alacevich and Boianovsky, “Writing the History of Development Economics”; Boumans and De Marchi, “Models, Measurement, and ‘Universal Patterns’”; and Macekura, “Development and Economic Growth.”
O Estado de S. Paulo, “O milagre.”
Velloso, “Continuidade foi uma das causas do êxito.” All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.
Weis and Rocha, “Êles planejam o nôvo Brasil,” 50.
For a discussion of “as if” narratives in economics, see Morgan and Stapleford, “Narrative in Economics.”
Weis and Rocha, “Êles planejam o nôvo Brasil,” 50, 46.
O Estado de S. Paulo, “Velloso faz estimativa otimista para o Brasil”; see also O Estado de S. Paulo, “Em 1973, as metas de 1974.” This elusive distinction was criticized in the highly censored press at the time. See, for example, O Estado de S. Paulo, “Diretrizes da política monetária.”
Weis and Rocha, “Êles planejam o nôvo Brasil,” 46. Kahn updated his estimates during the miracle. O Estado de S. Paulo, “Kahn reforma conceitos”; O Estado de S. Paulo, “Kahn: nem terrorismo pára êste País.”
See Vedoveli, “Brokering Capital.” For a contemporary discussion of the purposes of national wealth estimates, see Shimizu, “Wealth Surveys in Japan”; and Goldsmith, “Synthetic Estimate of the National Wealth of Japan.”
On how Celso Furtado, an influential Brazilian economist, explored this relationship, see Boianovsky, “View from the Tropics.”
Mário Mesquita has argued that the government’s incapacity to justify choices of economic policymaking during the period 1961 to 1964 such as the need for stabilization plans—which in 1961, 1963, and 1964 focused on constraining demand—produced a deterioration in the management of macroeconomic factors such as inflation (“Inflação, estagnação e ruptura”).
Macarini, “A política econômica da ditadura militar.” For contemporary perspectives, see Delfim Netto, “Perspectivas monetárias para o segundo semestre”; O Estado de S. Paulo, “Alcançados os objetivos”; and O Estado de S. Paulo, “Diretrizes da política monetária.”
On how the wage-price spiral influenced economic policymaking after World War II, see, for example, Tomlinson, “Managing the Economy.”
Maier, “Politics of Productivity.” As Stephen Macekura shows, this claim was supported by the League of Nations (“Whither Growth?”). For a history of scarcity, see Jonsson and Wennerlind, Scarcity, especially chap. 7.
See especially O Globo, “Simonsen acha que atual política econômica garante desenvolvimento”; hr11506798C34O Estado de S. Paulo, “Atualidade econômica”; and O Estado de S. Paulo, “O consumo de energia elétrica.”
Macarini, “A política econômica da ditadura militar.” For a contemporary assessment, see O Estado de S. Paulo, “O milagre.”
Maier, “Politics of Productivity,” 128. The politics of scarcity has a long genealogy. Margherita Zanasi argues that an unprecedented deterioration of economic conditions in late eighteenth-century imperial China led Chinese scholars and officials to seek “economic growth as a strategy for fighting scarcity and lifting the population of the empire out of poverty.” The recognition of the imperatives of “economic scarcity” led them to advocate for greater state intervention in the economy through planning and state-directed allocation of resources (“Globalizing Development,” 18; 20).
O Estado de S. Paulo, “Alcançados os objetivos.”
Resende, “Estabilização e reforma,” 210; O Globo, “Simonsen acha que atual política econômica garante desenvolvimento.”
Resende, “Estabilização e reforma,” 200–201.
Lago, “A retomada do crescimento,” 235.
Lago, “A retomada do crescimento,” 235.
Araujo, “A macroeconomia do governo Médici.” See also hr11506798C41O Estado de S. Paulo, “O milagre.”
O Estado de S. Paulo, “Salário superará parcela do BNH.”
O Estado de S. Paulo, “Política salarial motiva encontro de metalúrgicos.”
O Estado de S. Paulo, “Para [] salário.”
As note 36 shows, earlier narratives according a prominent role to the state as a promoter of plenty and prosperity against scarcity can be found, for example, in late imperial China. Margherita Zanasi, “Globalizing Development.”
Lago, “A retomada do crescimento.”
Lago, “A retomada do crescimento.”
Maier, “Politics of Productivity.” On how this trade-off was recognized by the management of the World Bank and shaped their investment priorities, see Alacevich, “World Bank.”
On national accounting as an instrument of governmentally, see Mitchell, “Economentality.” For economic growth as the response to French policymakers’ realization that decolonization brought the reality of finite resources to the core of French economic policymaking after World War II, see Angeletti, “La formation de l’économie française.”
Araujo, “A macroeconomia do governo Médici,” 60.
Lago, “A retomada do crescimento,” 237.
O Estado de S. Paulo, “Jornais ingleses comentam situação dos trabalhadores”; see also O Estado de S. Paulo, “Órgão londrino aponta riscos do autoritarismo.”
O Globo, “Simonsen acha que atual política econômica garante desenvolvimento.” For a contemporary profile of Mario Henrique Simonsen, future minister of the treasury (1974–79) during the Geisel administration, see Simonsen, “Fazenda.”
For conviction narratives, see Morgan and Stapleford, “Narrative in Economics.”
