The Political Economy of High Protection in Brazil before 1987

The paper is concerned with the high protection cum high growth experience in Brazil until the second half of the 1980s and its crisis. The paper is structured in four sections. The first section is a summary of the arguments presented in the following three sections of the paper. Section II considers the level of protection in Brazil compared with those of other Latin American economies and examines the reasons why it was so high while its economic growth performance was outstanding. The following section analyses the golden age of autarky until the early 1960s, including the role of foreign direct investment (FDI). The last section centers on the combination of export incentives with closed domestic markets that extended the life of import substitution industrialization (ISI) as a decreasingly effective economic strategy.