Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira is an economist and social scientist. He is emeritus professor at Getulio Vargas Foundation edits the Brazilian Journal of Political Economy since 1981 offers regularly a one month course at the École de Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales writes each two weeks a column in Folha de S. Paulo keeps up to date a website with his work and is member of several counsels and committees including the Committee of Experts in Public Administration of the United Nations.
From 1963 to 1982, while keeping his academic activities, he was vice-president of the large retailing company, Pão de Açúcar. In 1983, with the election of the first democratic governor to São Paulo, Franco Montoro, he became president of the state bank of São Paulo, and two years later, chief of staff of the governor. In April 1987, in the aftermath of the Cruzado Plan crisis, he became Finance Minister of Brazil: he was able to reestablish economic order, but, giving the lack of political conditions for the required fiscal adjustment, he resigned from the ministry at the end of that year. His proposal for solving the debt crisis through securitization of the debt with a discount was 18 months later adopted by the Brady Plan.
In 1995 he was invited to be Minister of Federal Administration and Reform of the State, in the first Fernando Henrique Cardoso administration. In this condition he introduced the 1995 Public Management Reform, which is today is recognized internationally. In 1999 he was, for six months, Minister of Science and Technology, and, from 199 to 2002, counsel to the president on matters of the Third Way.
Since July 1999 he is fully dedicated to the academic life at Getulio Vargas Foundation, where he teaches economics and political theory, and orient PhD candidates. He was visiting professor giving regular graduate courses on development economics at the University of Paris I (1978), and on political theory of modern democracy at USP’s Department of Political Science (2002-2003). He was also visiting fellow at USP’s Institute of Advanced Studies (1989) and at Oxford University’s Nuffield College (1999) and St. Anthony’s College (2001). In 2004, when he completed 70 years, 30 authors wrote papers analyzing his academic work: they form the festricht, Em Busca do Novo.
Intellectually he is an economist and a social theorist whose major influences came from Marx, Weber, Keynes, and from Latin American structuralism. His more significant contributions in economics deal with the revision of the classical model of economic growth, with the theory of inertial inflation, and with the claim that developing countries face a tendency to the overvaluation of the exchange rate in consequence of the Dutch disease and of the capital inflows attracted by higher profit and interest rates. In social theory his contributions are related to the new professional middle class or technobureaucracy and to the concept of a professionals’ capitalism. In political theory, his contributions are in the theory of transitions to democracy, in the definition of republican rights, and in the theory of public management reform. He applied these theories to the understanding of Brazil, its economy and society, its nation and state, its entrepreneurs and professionals, but often his analysis was more encompassing. He opposes the hypothetical-deductive method used by neoclassical economists to the historical-deductive methods that he adopts, arguing that only an empirical-deductive method is consistent with substantive and changing reality that is the one studied by economics and the other social sciences.
In his website, www.bresserpereira.org.br, most of his papers and columns are available. He published many books among which As Revoluções Utópicas dos Anos 60 [The 1960s’ Utopic Revolutions](1972), O Colapso de uma Aliança de Classes [The Collapse of a Class Alliance](1978), Development and Crisis in Brazil (1984), A Sociedade Estatal e a Tecnoburocracia [State Society and Technobureaucracy] (1980), The Theory of Inertial Inflation, with Yoshiaki Nakano (1987), Lucro, Acumulação e Crise [Profit, Accumulation and Crisis] (1986), Economic Reforms in New Democracies, with Adam Przeworski and José María Maravall (1993), Economic Crisis and State Reform in Brazil (1996), Reforma do Estado para a Cidadania [State Reform and Citizenship] (1998), Democracy and Public Management Reform: Building the Republican State (2004), and Macroeconomia da Estagnação [Macroeconomics of Stagnation](2007).
Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira was born in São Paulo, in 1934. He holds a bachelor’s degree in law by the University of São Paulo, a MBA by Michigan State University, and a PhD and a Livre Docência in economics by the University of São Paulo.
