The Brazilian State: Debate and Agenda
Lexington Books, 2011
Mauricio A. Font, Laura Randall, and Janaina Saad, eds.
The Brazilian State explores the changing roles, relation with society, and overall impact of the contemporary Brazilian State. The 16 chapters by scholars from Brazil and the United States contribute to the understanding of various policy areas in an emerging and fast-growing country. Collectively, the papers probe the relationship between state reform, institutional development, policy effectiveness, and economic dynamics since the 1930s, and provide analyses of issues that will be the center of debate in the presidency of the newly-elected Dilma Rousseff. This volume is part of the Bildner Western Hemisphere Book Series.
Book Review and Comments in Portuguese by Paulo Kramer
Program of the Book Launch in University of Brasília, October 7, 2011
Coffee and Transformation in São Paulo, Brazil
Lexington Books, 2010
Mauricio A. Font
The state of São Paulo has been the leader of Brazilian modernization, development, and industrialization since the latter part of the nineteenth century. Coffee and Transformation in São Paulo, Brazil advances a distinctive interpretation of this phenomenon. Large and entrepreneurial coffee landlords opened the frontier west of the state capital, and made up the world’s largest coffee producer. But foreign settlers made a major contribution to the last phase of frontier expansion in western São Paulo. They were an integral part of the dense networks of towns emerging in this region. This volume pays close attention to the political and economic implications of São Paulo’s great transformation and segmentation, including their links to internal conflict, the Brazilian Revolution of 1930, and regionalism.
Café e Política: Ação da Elite Cafeeiran a Política Paulista 1920-1930
University of São Paulo, 1988, Rev. 2010
Mauricio A. Font and Elba Barzelatto
This volume presents the methods and data of a research project on the collective action of São Paulo’s coffee elite. Directed by Mauricio Font and with the collaboration of Elba Barzelatto, this work is a systematic database that covers an important period, the 1920s, a time of change and rapid economic transformation in the state of São Paulo and the end of the Old Republic. Some of the findings and conclusions to this work are found in Prof. Font’s 2010 publication, Coffee and Transformation in São Paulo, Brazil. This volume is written in Portugese.
Reforming Brazil
Lexington Books, 2004
Mauricio A. Font, Anthony Peter Spanakos, and Cristina Bordin, eds.
For years, successive governments in Brazil grappled with the vexing issues of unequal distribution of wealth and runaway inflation. In the 1990s, long-overdue reforms began to help tame inflation, streamline bloated and ineffective government and address chronic social ills. But problems and questions remain: Why is Brazil still so poor, and why is inequality so intransigent? Were some reforms counter-productive, or could they have been implemented better?
Reforming Brazil is a thought-provoking examination of these and other important issues facing Brazil today, from privatization and agrarian reform to entrepreneurial programs and hemispheric integration. Written by 11 Brazilianist scholars from a range of disciplines and intellectual traditions, the book offers compelling new insights for international policymakers, economists and scholars of Brazil.
Mauricio Font’s introduction Dawn of a New Era.
Contents:
Part I: Introduction
Dawn of a New Era
Mauricio A. Font
1. The Reform Agenda
Anthony Peter Spanakos
Part II: Reforms
2. Monetary and Fiscal Reforms
Eliana Cardoso
3. Privatization: Reform through Negotiation
Maria Hermínia Tavares de Almeida
4. Social Policy Reform
Sônia Draibe
5. Agrarian Reform
Anthony Pereira
6. Political Reform: The “Missing Link”
David Fleischer
Part III: Institutions, Actors, and Regional Context
7. Competitive Federalism and Distributive Conflict
Alfred Montero
8. Industrialists and Liberalization
Peter Kingstone
9. Entreprenueurs: The PNBE
Eduardo Rodrigues Gomes and Fabrícia C. Guimarães
10. Working-Class Contention
Salvador Sandoval
11. Brazil and Hemispheric Integration
João Paulo Machado Peixoto
Transforming Brazil: A Reform Era in Perspective
Rowman & Littlefield, 2003
Mauricio A. Font
Transforming Brazil explores the complex web of policies, ideas, institutions, social forces, and political actors behind recent Brazilian reforms. By placing them in a broader analytical framework, it sets the backdrop for a better understanding of the character, timing, and sequence of the reform process. The focus is on the complex reform efforts during the post-1985 democratization era. The introductory chapters place Brazilian reform in comparative perspective and explore theories and accounts of the political, social and institutional context in which the reforms took place, the political process leading up to reforms, and the actors that influenced them, including elites, business, government, institutions and interest groups.
The analysis of stabilization and economic liberalization weaves in accounts of policies and of Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s election as president in 1994 and his re-election in 1998. The detailed study of privatization, deregulation, trade liberalization and opening of the economy, state and administrative reform, agrarian reform, changes in social security system, fiscal reforms, and related reforms during the eight years of the Cardoso government show that they amount to a turning point in Brazilian politics, even if several reforms remain incomplete. The analysis also points to factors shaping the reform process and the relationship between the reforms and vulnerability to external financial crises and shocks.
Transforming Brazil explores the rise and flux of a restructured industrial economy, with expanding service and agricultural sectors. It traces social and economic indicators from the 70’s to present, highlighting spatial and social differences. The chapter on social policy and collective action traces the history of the labor and landless movements. More broadly, it sheds light on how civil society and collective action influence agrarian reform and other reform process. The analysis also clarifies the nature of elite and popular support for the reform process. Business’ cordial, tentative and sometimes accusatory relationship with the reforming government, leading up to and throughout the post-1994 reform process, is analyzed, together with business’ newfound interest in social policy and philanthropy.
The volume assesses the extent to which this reform process represents a new development model or strategy and its relationship to democratization. The reform process has dismantled the statist regime in place since the Vargas’ era and sets the stage for a new, liberalizing one inspired by Social Democratic ideas. The impact of government efforts on social, economic, and human development is assessed. This study closes with a thoughtful discussion of the relationship between reform and democracy and advances a structural realignment model to highlight the centrality of political processes in reform and development.
Contents:
1. A Reform Era in Perspective
2. From Stabilization to Economic Liberalization
3. State in Transition
4. Social Development and Collective Action
5. Elites and Reform
6. Toward a New Development Strategy
7. Democracy, Realignment, and Reform
Appendix A Stabilization Plans after 1985
Appendix B Fiscal Adjustment Packages
Appendix C Planning and Social Development
Appendix D Statistical Trends
Appendix E Regional Differences
Charting a New Course: The Politics of Globalization and Social Transformation
Rowman & Littlefield, 2001
Mauricio A. Font, ed.
The book contains 26 essays written by Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Brazil’s President and world-class social scientist, at different stages of his impressive and influential intellectual trajectory. The book features an extensive Introduction by M. Font, and Cardoso’s bibliography by Danielle Ardaillon. For decades F. H. Cardoso has been among the most influential of Latin American scholars, his writings on globalization, dependency, and politics have reached a world-wide audience. This book, the third by Cardoso to come out in English, is the first to incorporate essays written during his tenure as president of Brazil. The transformation of Cardoso’s economic and political approach is nowhere better documented than in this broad-ranging collection of writings that span Cardoso’s early theoretical work through his pragmatic agenda for Brazil in a rapidly changing world economy. The book also traces the development of one of the world’s leading intellectuals, who took theory into the arena of policy when he became head of state.
Coffee, Contention, and Change: In the Making of Modern Brazil
Basil Blackwell, 1990
Mauricio A. Font
This book provides a new interpretation of a crucial period in the history of modern Brazil. It also challenges a pivotal tenet of development theory. The Revolution in Brazil in 1930, and the social, political, and economic movements in São Paulo and the south which led up to and followed it, have long been the subject of scrutiny by Latin American Scholars. The dependencia school of Cardoso and Fernandes and the Paulista school in sociology have generalized from their analysis of change in Brazil to argue a broad explanation of patterns of development: they describe a process in which, characteristically, coalitions of export elites exercise power over policy making, industrialization and the national economy. The coffee exporters of Brazil, they argue, were a classic example of such a powerful elite.
Basing his interpretation on original research into the social organization of the coffee sector, Mauricio Font challenges the monistic view of industrialization in Brazil as over-simple and misleading. He is able to show that a powerful group of small and medium producers consistently defied the larger landholders and acted against their coherence and power. This much more complex picture provides the basis for his alternative explanation of the roles both of large and of small planters in the Revolution of 1930, the origins of which, he argues, lies less in external factors than in the internal workings of the export sector.
Coffee, Contention, and Change is at once a compelling account of the intimate workings of a society in ferment, and an important theoretical contribution to studies of social organization and change. It may well have a profound effect on what have hitherto been accepted accounts of the political and the economic evolution of developing nations.