ABSTRACT
Brazil has perhaps the world’s most successful historical experience in adopting the import substitution strategy for economic development. Since the 1930s, the industrial growth of the country has been based on this strategy, and the results, in a broad perspective, have been very good. With the import substitution policies, Brazil’s society and economy modernized quickly. Since the early 1960s, more Brazilians live in urban areas than in the countryside. In the 1970s, the economy grew by more than 8 percent per year, and by the 1980s Brazil was the eighth largest economy in the world. However, such success also has had some drawbacks. In the mid-1980s, as the world economy began to change, new pressures were placed on the country’s patterns of insertion into the world market, and the weaker points of the import substitution strategy began to surface and the economy grew at a slower rate.
