ABSTRACT
Minerals offer an unusually clear venue for understanding the history and application of economic ideas in Brazil. This chapter demonstrates the path dependency of economic ideas and the importance of ideology for conditioning economic governance within Brazil by focusing on the long course of oft en competing debates about import-substituting industrialization, export promotion and foreign economic involvement. The strong hold of structuralist theories during the middle of the twentieth century; the role of foreign individuals, capital and technology; the divide between public and private sectors in the economic sphere and the emergence of the state as an industrial entrepreneur have been prevailing themes in Brazilian debates about governance and ideology. As we have seen in Chapters 3 to 5, they have also been the themes that dominated the institutional conflicts in developing industrialized iron ore capacity for three centuries.
