Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira

Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira (born 30 June 1934) is a Brazilian economist and social scientist. He teaches at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo. Since 1981, he has been the editor of the Brazilian Journal of Political Economy.

Bresser-Pereira served as the Minister of Finance of Brazil in 1987, under the presidency of José Sarney, and helped propose what would eventually become the Brady Plan which solved the country's foreign debt crisis. He also led the Ministry of Federal Administration and Reform of the State (MARE) from 1995 to 1998 and was Minister of Science and Technology in 1999. His career as an economist was largely focused on theoretical questions such as developmentalism, development macroeconomics, methodological critique of neoclassical economics, the theory of the democratic, social, and developmental state, and on the critique of neoliberalism. He also had an interest in applied questions relating to the economy of Brazil and its society.

Career
Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira was born in 1934 in São Paulo. He received a bachelor's degree in Law from the University of São Paulo (1957), an MBA from Michigan State University in 1960, and a PhD (1974) and livre-docência in Economics (1984) from the University of São Paulo. He taught at the Getulio Vargas Foundation from 1962. He was visiting professor at Pantheon-Sorbonne University (1977), at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (2003–2010), and at the University of São Paulo (1989 and 2002–2003). He was also visiting fellow at Nuffield College and St Antony's College, Oxford in 1999 and 2001.

From 1963 to 1982, while maintaining his academic roles, he was vice-president of Grupo Pão de Açúcar which by 1982 had become the largest retail chain in Brazil. In 1983, when Brazil was beginning to democratize, he entered public office, first as president of the Bank of the State of São Paulo (1983–1984). In 1985 and 1986, he was Chief of Staff of the Governor of São Paulo, André Franco Montoro. In 1987, he became Minister of Finance in the José Sarney administration. After leaving the ministry, he was a founding member of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB). Between 1995 and 1998, he was the head of the MARE, and in 1999 Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation, both under the Fernando Henrique Cardoso administration. After 1999 he returned full-time to academia. In 2010 he left the PSDB, arguing that the political party had turned conservative.

Finance Minister (1987)
In 1987 he took over the Brazilian Ministry of Finance at a moment of deep crisis that followed the failure of the Cruzado Plan: inflation reached 15% a month, while both firms and Brazil's states went bankrupt. Negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the fiscal adjustments that their proposals would entail were seen by the politicians in power as unacceptable. Nevertheless, Bresser-Pereira prepared a "Macroeconomic Adjustment Plan", which included measures necessary to control inflation. Second, he prepared and adopted what came to be known as the Bresser Plan, which was ultimately not successful.

Third, he developed a plan based on the securitization of foreign debt, based on measures New York City had taken to bring its debt under control in the 1970s. This approach would have largely excluded commercial banks and the IMF, but it was rejected by US Treasury Secretary James Baker. Nevertheless 18 months later it was taken up by Baker's successor, Nicholas F. Brady, and it was the Brady Plan that brought Brazil's foreign debt crisis to a close.

Minister of Federal Administration and Reform of the State (1995–1998)
With the election of Fernando Henrique Cardoso to the presidency of Brazil, Bresser-Pereira took charge of the Ministry of Federal Administration and Reform of the State (MARE). He developed a white paper, "Plano Diretor da Reforma do Aparelho do Estado" (English: 'Master Plan for the Reform of the State Apparatus'), which offered a theoretical framework for public sector reform based on managerial principles. These included management by results, competition for excellence between state organizations, a formal system of social accountability and the creation of social organizations – non-profit organizations to which he argued the state should transfer its large social and scientific responsibilities since these did not need to involve the use of state power. He also proposed an amendment to the chapter on public administration contained in the 1988 Constitution. The managerial reform of the Brazilian state has continued since his term of office, and a large number of social organizations continue to be created. The reforms he led in 1998 became an international benchmark of their type. The books and papers that Bresser-Pereira wrote on the subject have become a main element in courses on public administration offered by Brazilian universities. Several master's and PhD dissertations have been written on the reform. While at the MARE, Bresser-Pereira was also president of the Latin American Center for the Administration of Development (Centro Latino Americano de Administração para o Desenvolvimento; CLAD) between 1995 and 1997. During his term, he gave a Latin American dimension to managerial reform, and with the same objective he organized the first yearly congress of CLAD, which is today the organization's key activity.

Minister of Science and Technology (1999)
At the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation Bresser-Pereira defined the policy of transforming the research funds originated from the recently privatized state-owned enterprises into Sectorial Funds attached to the National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development. In order to achieve better integration between the Ministry and its main agency, the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), he also presided over the agency. Bresser-Pereira unified the academic curriculum vitae (CV) that the Federal Government requires for the evaluation of researchers under the Lattes Platform.

Academic work
Bresser-Pereira has taught economics at the Getulio Vargas Foundation since 1962, where he became Professor Emeritus in 2005. In 1996 at the foundation in São Paulo, he created the first master's program for business administration in Brazil. He founded and has been the editor of the Brazilian Journal of Political Economy since 1981. He is a frequent contributor to newspapers, particularly to Folha de S.Paulo. His main contributions to economic theory are the historical model of growth and distribution with three types of technical progress, the theory of inertial inflation, a methodological critique to neoclassical economics, and the theories and models forming new developmentalism and developmental macroeconomics. In political and social theory he worked on the rise of the technobureaucratic or professional class, on the theory of the modern state, and on the relation between democracy and economic development or the capitalist revolution. Since 2001 he has been involved in defining new developmentalism – a project involving macroeconomics, a political economy, and a draft of microeconomics.

Selected books

 * Development and Crisis in Brazil. Westview Press. 1984. ISBN 0-86531-559-0.
 * A Sociedade Estatal e a Tecnoburocracia [State Society and Technobureaucracy] (in Portuguese). Editora Brasiliense. 1981.
 * Lucro, Acumulação e Crise [Profit, Accumulation and Crisis] (in Portuguese). Editora Brasiliense. 1986. ISBN 8511090339.
 * The Theory of Inertial Inflation, with Yoshiaki Nakano. Lynne Rienner Publishers. 1987. ISBN 1-55587-007-4.
 * Economic Reforms in New Democracies, with José María Maravall and Adam Przeworski. Cambridge University Press. 1993. ISBN 1-55587-532-7.
 * Democracy and Public Management Reform. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-926118-0.
 * Developing Brazil: Overcoming the Failure of the Washington Consensus. Lynne Rienner Publishers. 2009. ISBN 978-1-58826-624-8.
 * Globalization and Competition. Cambridge University Press. 2010. ISBN 978-0-521-19635-2.
 * Developmental Macroeconomics: New Developmentalism as a Growth Strategy, with Nelson Marconi and José Luis Oreiro. London: Routledge, 2014. ISBN 978-0-415-81778-3 (hardback) and ISBN 978-0-203-58350-0 (e-book).

Selected papers

 * "Six interpretations on the Brazilian social formation". Latin American Perspectives. 11 (1): 35–72. Winter 1984.
 * "Citizenship and res publica: the emergence of republican rights". Citizenship Studies. 6 (2): 145–164. 2002.
 * "The two methods and the hard core of economics". Journal of Post Keynesian Economics. 31 (3): 493–522. Spring 2009.
 * "The global financial crisis, neoclassical economics, and the neoliberal years of capitalism". Revue de la Régulation. 7: 1–29. Spring 2010.
 * "From the national-bourgeoisie to the dependency interpretation of Latin America". Latin American Perspectives. 178, 38 (3): 40–58. May 2011.
 * "Democracy and capitalist revolution". Économie Appliquée. 65 (4): 111–139. 2012.

Honors and distinctions

 * 1997 – Honorary Knight Commander of The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire
 * 2005 – Professor Emeritus, Getulio Vargas Foundation
 * 2010 – Doctor Honoris Causae, University of Buenos Aires
 * 2012 – James Street Scholar, Association for Evolutionary Economics
 * 2015 – Juca Pato Award, as the 2014 intellectual of the year, Brazilian Association of Writers
 * 2017 – Title of Emeritus Researcher (Applied Social Sciences), CNPq