ABSTRACT
By means of an analysis of long-trend series derived and estimated from primary data, several important macroeconomic changes that seem both to result from and contribute to the reduction of growth are investigated. Moreover, a macroeconometric model is used to investigate the dynamics of Brazil's economy, focusing especially on the role of investment. Synthesizing the main tendencies of the Brazilian economy in the last decades, one may say that, after the first half of the 1980s, the country was marked by long periods of stagnation, a strong reduction of investment's share in GDP, a sharp increase of government spending, extremely high inflation and real interest rates and, more recently, by a major increase in imports. From the 1950s until the early 1970s, the important and positive role of the Brazilian public sector in the significant economic growth and development that characterized that period is indisputable.
