ABSTRACT
The paper analyzes the changing role of the state in the Brazilian economy and its development. We argue that the Brazilian case is a useful example of how state influence in the economy has changed over the last three decades. Brazil, like most Latin American countries, has a long history of state capitalism, best described as “hierarchical market economies” (Schneider 2013) and “state-permeated market economies” (Nölke et al. 2015) that differ substantially from other more advanced countries (mostly analyzed in the Varieties of Capitalism scholarship and throughout this volume). While the emergence of the state-owned sector in Brazil has followed a similar path as in most countries around the world, 1 looking at the overarching, complex nature and persistence of state influence, Brazil substantially differs from the experiences and practices of more advanced countries. This makes Brazil a “good laboratory to study SOEs” (Musacchio and Lazzarini 2014a, 1).
