O debate desenvolvimentista no Brasil no limiar do século XXI: uma análise das políticas econômicas e sociais dos governos Lula e Dilma

Abstract

Understanding the socioeconomic development has always mobilized debates about strategies for overcoming underdevelopment and dynamizing national economies. The long tradition of thought that saw the modernization of productive forces through industrialization as a path to development had its pioneering spirit on the European continent. However, it was the attempt to explain Latin American underdevelopment from the point of view of asymmetric relations between central and peripheral countries that made this thought gain strength in Latin America. The long years of discussion brought the opportunity to update ideas, starting from the rescue of an original thought of the past and responding to the challenges of today. Based on this, the objective of this work is to analyze whether the economic and social policies of the Lula and Dilma government periods can be characterized as developmental. The hypothesis is that despite efforts to build a developmental project, it is not possible to classify these governments as such. For that, the ideas of the old developmentalism and the new developmentalisms were taken up, as well as the main axes of the economic policy of the Workers’ Party governments. The methodology used was a review of the literature on thinking about economic development in Brazil since the mid-twentieth century, in addition to the analysis of studies on the performance of economic policy in the Lula and Dilma governments. The descriptive analysis of the policies implemented between 2003-2014 showed that it is not possible to observe from all these measures that they were developmentalist governments, given the coexistence of pro- employment and pro-investment policies with orthodox measures.