The economist, former minister and federal deputy Antonio Delfim Netto, who coordinated Brazil’s economic policy during the military dictatorship (1964–1985), continued to exercise influence after redemocratization, and helped to create a key postgraduate program in his discipline in the country. He passed away on August 12 in São Paulo, aged 96.
Born in the working-class neighborhood of Cambuci, São Paulo, in 1928, Delfim graduated in accountancy at the Carlos de Carvalho Technical Trade School. In 1948 he embarked upon an economics course at what is today known as the School of Economics, Business and Accounting of the University of Sao Paulo (FEA-USP), which had been created three years earlier.
After his graduation in 1952, Netto became assistant to professor Luiz de Freitas Bueno (1922–2006), of the statistics chair. A pioneer in introducing quantitative methods for economic studies in Brazil, Bueno played a decisive role in Delfim’s instruction, along with historian Alice Canabrava (1911–2003), who encouraged students to obtain data from primary sources.
The influence of both is evident in the associate professor habilitation thesis he defended in 1959 at USP, “The coffee problem in Brazil,” for which he studied policies on the commodity’s price valuation during the First Republic (1889–1930). “Delfim conducted a comprehensive survey of background data and applied sophisticated econometric techniques for the time to analyze them,” says economist Roberto Macedo, who directed FEA between 1986 and 1990.
He concluded that interventions in the coffee market contributed to its instability, stimulating increased national output and the involvement of new competitors in the external market. “The thesis brought about an important review of that period and was one of the first in the country to incorporate a methodology still in the early days of discovery around the globe,” recounts Gian Carlo Maciel Guimarães Hespanhol, who studied the thinking of Delfim for his master’s dissertation, presented at the USP School of Philosophy, Languages and Literature, and Human Sciences (FFLCH) in 2017.
In 1963, Delfim took over the Economic Development Theory chair at FEA after defending the thesis “A few issues in planning for economic development.” In this study he analyzed the models proposed by international literature at the time, still difficult to access by Brazilian researchers, and submitted a number of policies to econometric tests.
Delfim was the first economist to graduate from FEA and become a full professor, a post at the pinnacle of the lecturing career at that time, prior to the 1968 university reform, which did away with the chair regime. He organized weekly seminars to discuss academic books and articles, tasking students to read and present on them to their classmates. Some of these gatherings were held in the afternoons, and would finish well into the night, with pizza eaten and whisky imbibed.
In 1965, Delfim was party to the creation of the Economic Research Institute (IPE), the discipline’s first postgraduate center at USP. In the same year, the Rio branch of the Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV) created the Economics Graduate School (EPGE). The United States government and the Ford Foundation funded scholarships and advisement from American professors for the two institutions.
The economist headed up the Ministry of Finance between 1967 and 1974, with the military dictatorship in full swing. Over these seven years, Brazil’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew by an average 10% per year and doubled in size. Reforms effected by the government of General Humberto Castello Branco (1897–1967), the first after the coup in 1964, and the favorable overseas situation, paved the way for measures he put in place, such as the expansion of credit and stimulation of exports.
This period would come to be known as the “economic miracle,” as the growth boost was neither accompanied by an uneven balance of payments, nor by an inflationary surge. Statistics published years later called these results into question, with a considerable increase in the concentration of income at the tip of the social pyramid.
The political circumstances of the time enabled Delfim to steer economic policy with powers that none of his successors enjoyed. In 1968, he was a signatory of Institutional Act no. 5 (AI-5), bringing on the most violent period of the authoritarian regime on closing down the National Congress, suspending constitutional guarantees, and intervening in state governments.
Under the government of General Emílio Garrastazu Médici (1905–1985), who ran the country between 1969 and 1974, Delfim encouraged investment in research to expand and diversify Brazilian agricultural output. As a minister, Delfim released resources to fund the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (EMBRAPA), created in 1973 and one of the research institutions responsible for the development of techniques enabling an increase of productivity in the field.
In 1974, when General Ernesto Geisel (1907–1996) took over the presidency, Delfim was replaced at the Treasury by economist Mário Henrique Simonsen (1935–1997), of FGV Rio, and was nominated as Brazilian ambassador to France in Paris. He returned to the government in Brazil in 1979, after the last military general president, João Baptista Figueiredo (1918–1999), took office. He was Agriculture Minister for five months, and then once again took the helm of the economy, replacing Simonsen in Planning.
The economy had been rattled by external shocks blows in the previous years, experiencing growing inflation and debt, and falling into a recession at the beginning of the 1980s. “The situation began to improve at the end of the dictatorship, but it was still chaotic, and the imbalances were only corrected after democracy returned,” says economist Marcos Lisboa, who ran the INSPER Education and Research Institute and was a professor at FGV’s EPGE in Rio.
Elected as a federal deputy in 1986, Delfim was part of the Constituent National Assembly, and was reelected four times. He left the Chamber of Deputies in early 2007. During the first term of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003–2006), he became an advisor and proposed a public deficit control plan, but this was dismissed by the Workers’ Party (PT).
An emeritus professor at USP, the economist died “due to health complications,” according to a communication from the family. He was the widower of Mercedes Saporski Delfim when he remarried with Gervásia Diório, by whom he had a daughter, Fabiana. He is also survived by his grandson Rafael.
In 2011, Delfim Netto donated his private collection, with more than 100,000 titles, to USP
FEA-USP archiveAbove: one part of the collection donated by Delfim to FEA-USP, with works such as The Wealth of Nations (top right) by Adam Smith, in EnglishFEA-USP archive
An avid reader, Delfim Netto left his legacy in the form of a huge private collection of books—mostly on economics—along with scientific journals and articles. Currently housed in the library of the School of Economics, Business and Accounting of the University of Sao Paulo (FEAUSP), this collection of eight decades brings together more than 100,000 items, including 94,531 books and thousands of academic publications; Netto had them copied and organized into bound volumes.
The FEA library was renovated and extended to receive the collection that he decided to donate in 2011, and he continued making sporadic donations after its inauguration in 2014. While there are no rarities in the archive, it is up there among the most comprehensive private collections of books on economics in Brazil. According to the library administration, the space currently receives some 50 in-person consultations per month; The demand was greater in the early years, but dwindled after the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The collection is priceless, above all for its comprehensiveness,” economist Eduardo Giannetti da Fonseca, a former FEA professor, told Pesquisa FAPESP; Fonseca first visited the Delfim library in the early years of his academic career, the 1980s. At that time, while researching and lecturing at the University of Cambridge in the UK, Giannetti made copies of nineteenth-century pamphlets and treaties in the rare works section of the British institution’s library at the request of Delfim, as he recounted in an interview with Piauí magazine.
The archive includes several editions of classics such as Foundations of Economic Analysis, authored by US economist Paul Samuelson (1915–2009), released in 1947 and revised and extended in the 1980s. One of the copies has handwritten notes made by Delfim. The library also has facsimile reproductions of first editions of titles such as The Wealth of Nations, by Scottish philosopher Adam Smith (1723–1790), and Capital, by German Karl Marx (1818–1883).
