Tavares in 1994 at the offices of newspaper Folha de S.PauloBel Pedrosa / Folhapress
Maria da Conceição Tavares, the professor who tutored generations of economists and influenced the debate on industry and development in Brazil, passed away during the early hours of June 8 at her home in Nova Friburgo, Rio de Janeiro State. She was 94 years old and had lived reclusively with relatives for almost 4 years, after a domestic accident and a broken leg took her out of combat.
Born in Anadia, Portugal, in 1930, two years after Antonio de Oliveira Salazar (1889–1970) rose to power, Tavares moved to Brazil in 1954, a few months after graduating from the University of Lisboa’s Mathematical Sciences School. Her father was a wine importer and exporter, and decided to set up in Brazil; Tavares accompanied him with her first husband, engineer Pedro José Serra Ribeiro Soares, while pregnant with their first child Laura.
She got her first job in 1955 at the former National Institute of Immigration and Colonization, where she worked as a statistician and helped to organize data on land ownership in Brazil. “Her contact with the agrarian issue was decisive in her move to study economics,” explained economist Hildete Pereira de Melo, of Fluminense Federal University (UFF), and friend of Tavares.
In 1956, Tavares joined the School of Economic Sciences and Administration at the University of Brazil, today known as the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). Her professors included freely formed economists who had occupied key positions in the Brazilian government, such as Octavio Gouvêa de Bulhões (1906–1990) and Roberto Campos (1917–2001). During this course she became a Brazilian citizen and worked for two years as an analyst at the Brazilian Development Bank (then BNDE, currently BNDES).
Tavares stood out quickly in a profession dominated by men since time immemorial. She worked as Bulhões’s assistant at the University of Brazil, starting her teaching career in 1961, and in the same year was hired by the study center that became a reference for developmental thinking: the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). The Commission kept an office in Rio de Janeiro, headed by Chilean Aníbal Pinto (1919–1996), who Tavares considered her main intellectual mentor.
She stayed on in Brazil after the 1964 military coup, and taught on the Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV) master’s course at the suggestion of Bulhões, who ran the Treasury Ministry at the beginning of the dictatorship (1964–1985). As the regime intensified, she transferred to the Chile ECLAC office, where she worked from 1968 to 1972.
Her most impactive work in this period was “Além da estagnação” (Beyond stagnation), coauthored with José Serra, who left Brazil in 1964 and graduated in economics in Chile. Published in 1971, this piece refuted a theory defended by Celso Furtado (1920–2004) in the 1960s, and proposed a new interpretation for the development of the Brazilian economy in the years of accelerated growth that became known as the economic miracle of the dictatorship.
For Tavares and Serra, the offer of credit to purchase durable goods and other incentives adopted at the time had seen the economy grow, even with compression in the salaries of less qualified workers. As economist Ricardo Bielschowsky, of UFRJ, observed while appreciating the work of his colleague in 2010, the 1971 article exposed this bizarre side of the military government’s economic policy: “You could grow by concentrating income, and, worse still, this income concentration fed a process of accelerated growth.”
Shortly after the articles published, Tavares wrote a letter to Furtado in which she referred to him as Master, and apologized for having criticized him; she received a cordial reply. “Conceição was a restless intelligence,” recalls economist Luiz Gonzaga Belluzzo, who worked with her at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP). “She could sound aggressive at times, but she questioned ideas, rather than arguing with people.”
According to economist Laura Carvalho, a former student of Tavares at UFRJ and currently a professor at the University of São Paulo’s School of Economics, Administration, Accounting, and Actuarial Science (FEA-USP), her works brought fresh perspectives for comprehension of the country: “Conceição made us look in conjunction at issues such as growth, wealth distribution, and politics, often left on the sidelines by analyses that concentrated on the importance of macroeconomic indicators.”
Back in Brazil in 1973, Tavares resumed her work at UFRJ and contributed to setting up an economics postgraduate program at UNICAMP, inaugurated two years later with a proposal that criticized the orthodox thinking which dominated in other schools. During this time, the researcher published Da substituição de importações ao capitalismo financeiro (Substitution of importations into financial capitalism; Zahar Editores, 1972), which brought together some of her key pieces written while at ECLAC. In 1979 she helped to create the first center for postgraduate economics at UFRJ: the Institute of Industrial Economics, which she ran for two years.
The economist was arrested by the dictatorship in 1974, and released only after the intervention of then Treasury Minister Mario Henrique Simonsen (1935–1997), a former colleague at FGV. In 1975, just months after her imprisonment, she defended her doctoral and full faculty membership thesis at UFRJ, “Acumulação de capital e industrialização no Brasil” (“Accumulation of capital and industrialization in Brazil”), touching on themes she had been discussing since her early career. After Bulhões retired 3 years later, Tavares became a standing professor with the thesis “Ciclo e crise: O movimento recente da economia brasileira” (“Cycle and crisis: The recent movement of the Brazilian economy”).
When the country once again became a democracy in 1986, with Belluzzo and his UNICAMP colleagues in the José Sarney government (1985–1989), she collaborated on preparations for the Cruzado (monetary) Plan, the first of a sequence of programs aimed at containing inflation. Tavares disagreed with the theoretical assumptions of the plan, but actually cried when defending it in a live interview on TV.
In 1994, when she affiliated to the Workers’ Party (PT) to run for a seat in the Chamber of Deputies, she predicted that the Real (monetary) Plan would be another failure, causing a recession and salary crunch. “The Real Plan was successful in terms of monetary stabilization, but not in renewed growth. Conceição’s criticism was pertinent,” states economist Gloria Maria Moraes da Costa, of Mackenzie Rio Presbyterian College.
In an interview given to journal Valor Econômico, economist Edmar Bacha, one of the formulators of the Real Plan, emphasized Tavares’s fundamental contributions to comprehending the Brazilian economy: “Currents are of little importance — what matters is the quality of the analysis. Conceição’s was exceptional.”
Tavares was elected federal deputy for Rio de Janeiro State and served one term. “As a parliamentarian, Conceição firmly positioned herself against privatizations and dismantling of the State, and wrote important articles on the matter,” recalls Costa.
In more recent years Tavares has become popular on the internet through videos with excerpts from her classes on the course she ran at UNICAMP in 1992. The original videos, with a full 12 classes, were published in 2017 on the university’s Economics Institute YouTube channel. In 2021, short clips began to circulate on other social media. “Conceição wasn’t into technology, and wrote by hand, but she found this story funny,” says Costa.
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