Brazil’s economy – 1971–2008. Growth patterns and structural change

Growth cycles are well documented and studied phenomena in the LDCs; in the case of Latin America, they are often related to the evolution of the conditions of international liquidity (Amado et al., 2007). But, in general, growth in such countries tends to be less stable than in developed ones, as those economies are often constrained by a variety of domestic and international constraints, among them, balance-of- payments constraints. This has been true also of our case study hereafter, the Brazilian economy: at the beginning of the 1960s and in the 1980s, and again, more recently, during the second half of the 1990s following the financial crises of Mexico in 1995, Asia in 1997 and Russia in 1998. The unfolding of the current major crisis will surely offer more evidence, urging a fresh reflection on comparative growth dynamics.