ABSTRACT
This chapter explains that since 1974, the slowing growth rates, the more than doubling of international debt, the worsening inequities in income distribution, renewed increases in inflation, and increased social repression have brought the "Brazilian development model" into question. Some see these reversals as short-term consequences of the 1974 global recession; others see them as inevitable results of inappropriate production and exchange structures worsened by the deepening of deficit-financed industrialization which emphasized the production of consumer durables. Apparently, the major reason the 1974 global recession struck Brazil so severely that its asymmetrical production structure oriented toward a narrow domestic consumption market, and the stagnation of its previously flourishing trade market which was unable to shift its emphases from weak sectors to relatively strong sectors. Many of short-term difficulties are rooted in the dilemma that Brazil's production output is aimed at a narrow domestic market and at an expanding external market.
