ABSTRACT
Brazil’s industrialization long appeared to be a pronounced case of success. A country that at the beginning of the 1950s still had an agrarian character turned, in the course of 30 years, into one of the world’s major industrial states.1 At the end of the 1970s there was hardly any doubt that the country would close the gap separating it from the OECD countries, much in the same way that South Korea and Taiwan in fact did hi the 1980s. Yet from 1979 on Brazil lapsed into a rapid succession of acute crises and brief periods of growth, and these can, on the whole, be interpreted as the structural crisis of the ISI model.
