Moving away from the Washington consensus. A critical assessment of strategic selectivity by Brazilian state institutions
| dc.contributor.advisor | Wigger, A. | |
| dc.contributor.author | Smit, Arnout | |
| dc.date.issued | 2013-08-26 | |
| dc.description.abstract | Over the course of the 2000s, Brazilian regional policy started to move away from economic policies associated with the neoliberal Washington Consensus of laissez-faire capitalism. Although the Brazilian government had clearly promoted neoliberal economic development in the 1990s, it now established non-neoliberal initiatives and international organizations. At the same time, dependency on traditional international financial institutions like the IMF was decreased. This thesis seeks to explain this change in policy. The critical approach developed in this thesis emphasizes the strategic selectivity by Brazilian state institutions towards changing hegemonic configurations of social forces in Brazil. Mainstream theories like economic realism are not applied as they work within a state-central paradigm and thereby ignore and legitimize unequal domestic and transnational power relations. Moreover, approaches that are more critical, like World System Theory, seem to provide more insight on unequal power relations but fail to account for the role of agency by state institutions. The analysis shows that Brazilian economic policy over the course of the 20th and 21st century alternately favors different accumulation strategies articulated by fractions of three different social forces in Brazil: national capital, foreign capital and labor. While foreign capital became hegemonic in the 1990s, the 2000s saw the emergence of Brazilian, export-oriented capital. This fraction of national capital re-articulated developmentalist, state-interventionist policies of before the 1980s, while approaching the accumulation strategy of Transnational Corporations of the 1990s. Consequently, Brazilian state institutions selected their interests by establishing regional international financial institutions that enable state support for Brazilian exporters in the Latin American region. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://theses.ubn.ru.nl/handle/123456789/1099 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | en_US |
| dc.thesis.faculty | Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen | en_US |
| dc.thesis.specialisation | International Relations | en_US |
| dc.thesis.studyprogramme | Master Political Science | en_US |
| dc.thesis.type | Master | en_US |
| dc.title | Moving away from the Washington consensus. A critical assessment of strategic selectivity by Brazilian state institutions | en_US |
Files
Original bundle
1 - 1 of 1
No Thumbnail Available
- Name:
- MA012.37 Arnout Smit.docx
- Size:
- 254.21 KB
- Format:
- Microsoft Word XML