SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This article critically reviews the design of neo-developmentalist economic policies in Brazil, in the first half of the last decade, and their relationship with the economic policies of the Lula administration after 2006. Paradoxically, the neo-developmentalist policies were implemented jointly with the main (neoliberal) macroeconomic policies which had been introduced earlier. The article reviews the relevant literature, and examines the contradictory nature of this ‘inflection’ of economic policy. So far, this combination of policies has achieved an unquestionable – though provisional – success, despite the persistence of the structural macroeconomic problems due to the continuity of the neoliberal policies.