ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the entrepreneurial dimension of Brazil's energy policies since the first oil shock in 1973. It shows that success in economic terms may carry with it serious consequences in social and political terms. Politicians and planners in the industrializing Southeast, which consumed well over half of the nation's electricity, feared that a worsening electricity crunch would strangle their booming economies. The evolution of Brazil's nuclear energy policy gives rise to several observations on politics in authoritarian Brazil, on nuclear-energy policy-making in general, and on state entrepreneurship. Brazil's new economic diplomacy has shifted an important share of responsibility in foreign policy-making away from the Ministry of Foreign Relations, most of whose high-level officials have little training in economics, to other institutions. Brazilian weapons salesmen aggressively pursue export contracts around the world, with particular emphasis on the Middle East. Toward the socialist nations, the Brazilian military regime maintained correct, low-level ties in the 1960s.
