{"id":383571,"date":"2021-02-19T14:32:06","date_gmt":"2021-02-19T17:32:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=383571"},"modified":"2021-02-19T14:33:30","modified_gmt":"2021-02-19T17:33:30","slug":"the-multifaceted-legacy-of-a-structuralist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/the-multifaceted-legacy-of-a-structuralist\/","title":{"rendered":"The multifaceted legacy of a structuralist"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Al\u00e9cio de Andrade \/ ADAGP Paris<\/span><\/a> Celso Furtado in Paris (1971)Al\u00e9cio de Andrade \/ ADAGP Paris<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

In his autobiographical book, A fantasia organizada<\/em> (Organized fantasy; Paz e Terra, 1985), economist Celso Furtado (1920\u20132004) relates a curious episode back in 1951. The first results from a study he codeveloped with Ra\u00fal Prebisch (1901\u20131986) had just been published in the journal Revista Brasileira de Economia<\/em>, in a paper titled \u201cInterpreta\u00e7\u00e3o do processo de desenvolvimento econ\u00f4mico\u201d (Interpretation of economic development processes), and were about to be presented at a conference in Rio de Janeiro, when the eminent Canadian economist Jacob Viner (1892\u20131970) decided to travel to Brazil. He made no secret of the purpose of his visit: to debunk the concept of underdevelopment that had been introduced by the two Latin American economists. Furtado recalls in his book how Viner declared during the conference that, \u201cIt makes no sense to refer to a country as underdeveloped.\u201d<\/p>\n

But in spite of Viner, the ensuing decades saw the expression become mainstream in scientific theory, public policy, and party platforms all around the world. Furtado\u2019s name became strongly associated with the concept, which he often used in the titles of his books, such as Desenvolvimento e subdesenvolvimento<\/em> (Development and underdevelopment; Fundo de Cultura, 1961), Obstacles to development in Latin America <\/em>(1966), and Teoria e pol\u00edtica do desenvolvimento econ\u00f4mico<\/em> (Economic development: Theory and policy; Editora Nacional, 1967).<\/p>\n

\u201cFurtado was part of a post-World War II generation that questioned traditional Western classifications in economics and social sciences,\u201d says Carlos Mallorqu\u00edn, a professor at the Center for Development Studies at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas, in Mexico. \u201cFurtado realized that if social science abstracts questions from asymmetric power relations between countries, regions, classes, and other agents that make up the economic fabric in the periphery, it is at best irrelevant.\u201d Mallorqu\u00edn notes how the Brazilian economist never gave his books titles such as Development theory<\/em> or Why some countries achieve development<\/em>. \u201cHe emphasized policy, as in his classic book, Teoria e pol\u00edtica do desenvolvimento econ\u00f4mico<\/em> (Economic development: Theory and policy),\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Born in the town of Pombal, in Brazil\u2019s northeastern state of Para\u00edba, Furtado was among Brazil\u2019s most widely read, translated, and influential economists of the previous century. After earning a degree in law at the University of Brazil, now the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), he obtained his doctoral degree at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), France, in 1948, with a thesis about Brazilian colonial economics. The next year, as head of the Economic Development Division of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), he and Prebisch codeveloped the theory of underdevelopment, which dealt with relationships between the center and periphery of the world economy.<\/p>\n

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National Archives <\/span><\/a> In a photo taken in 1960 (left to right<\/em>): Cear\u00e1 Governor Parsifal Barroso, president Juscelino Kubitschek, Furtado, and Jo\u00e3o GoulartNational Archives <\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Back in Brazil, he chaired a joint research group created by ECLAC and the Brazilian Economic Development Bank (BNDE, then without the \u201cS\u201d for \u201cSocial\u201d), whose reports formed the backbone for president Juscelino Kubitschek\u2019s (1902\u20131976) ambitious development program, Plano de Metas<\/em>, in 1955. During his tenure as the first director of the Northeast Development Agency (SUDENE), from 1959 to 1964, he served as Planning Minister under president Jo\u00e3o Goulart (1919\u20131976), developing an economic stabilization plan in 1963 which, however, failed to garner congressional support and was abruptly abandoned. Following his exile in France during the military dictatorship (1964\u20131985), he served as Minister of Culture during the Jos\u00e9 Sarney administration between 1986 and 1988, creating the first cultural tax incentive framework in Brazil (\u201cLei Sarney\u201d). He was married twice: first to the Argentine chemist Lucia Piave Tosi, with whom he had two children\u2014economist Andr\u00e9 Tosi Furtado and physicist Mario Tosi Furtado; and later to journalist Rosa Freire d\u2019Aguiar, in 1978.<\/p>\n

\u201cFurtado was a pioneer,\u201d says Deepak Nayyar, a professor of economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India. \u201cStructuralism was highly influential in the 1960s and 1970s. Its central premise was that underdevelopment and development could not be analyzed without situating economies within their political and social context, in which history plays an important role.\u201d The structuralist approach, explains Nayyar, places an emphasis on nations\u2019 colonial past, agrarian structures, deindustrialization, economic inequalities, social stratification, and political systems. \u201cFurtado emphasized the importance of institutions, the critical role of government, the unequal international division of labor, and the nature of global capitalism,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

The concept of underdevelopment has since lost favor among economists, being superseded by expressions such as \u201cdeveloping countries\u201d or \u201cemerging markets.\u201d In economics programs, most university students are exposed to Furtado\u2019s work through one book in particular, The Economic Growth of Brazil: A Survey from Colonial to Modern Times<\/em>. It was this book, says Nayyar, that introduced him to the Brazilian\u2019s work while a student at the University of Delhi in the 1960s.<\/p>\n

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White House \/ John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum<\/span><\/a> In July 1961, with US president John F. KennedyWhite House \/ John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cBecause economics has now become more mathematical, he is now seen more as a historian,\u201d says Marcos Costa Lima, a professor of International Relations at the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE). For Mallorqu\u00edn, neoclassical economics regained its central position after being \u201clocked out by structuralist thinking.\u201d<\/p>\n

That is not to say his work has faded entirely into obscurity. The influence of his books is evident in fields extending beyond economics. Furtado explored multiple fields of knowledge as a thinker, decades before graduate programs encouraged research from multiple perspectives.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe ventured beyond the limited domains of his field. As his work evolved, it became increasingly holistic in its perception and articulation of social processes,\u201d analyzes Costa Lima.<\/p>\n

His approach to development\u2014the major subject around which his works orbited\u2014was never confined to economic development only. As economist Ricardo Bielschowsky of UFRJ aptly put it, Furtado\u2019s work was like a building with a foundation and three floors. The foundation is the historical-structural method inherited from Prebisch and ECLAC, but with a greater historical footing.<\/p>\n

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Archive<\/span><\/a> Furtado with Robert Sargent Shriver, director of the US Peace CorpsArchive<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

The first floor is his analysis of underdevelopment, for which he is better known and\u2014says Bielschowsky\u2014where he demonstrates greatest analytical rigor. The second floor is socioeconomic and sociopolitical, reflecting his own experience in government. The third and final floor is culture, which gained increasing prominence in his work as the subject of development became exhausted.<\/p>\n

\u201cCelso was an advocate for social progress, for which material progress is obviously necessary, but not sufficient. Hence the importance of culture and cultural thought,\u201d summarizes Fernando de Mattos, a professor at the School of Economics at Fluminense Federal University (UFF). Industrialization was subordinate to social progress and catalyzed by technology, on which Furtado also placed great emphasis.<\/p>\n

Cesar Bola\u00f1o, a professor in the Department of Economics at the Federal University of Sergipe (UFS), says Furtado\u2019s cultural writings led him to conceive of a political economy of communications and culture that is broader than in the conventional approach to cultural phenomena. In his book O conceito de cultura em Celso Furtado<\/em> (The concept of culture in Celso Furtado\u2019s work; EDUFBA, 2015), Bola\u00f1o shows that Furtado was influenced by authors in the field of anthropology, whose works convinced him that achieving development was more than a matter of reaching the consumption levels of wealthy nations. \u201cHis central concern was not that of creating jobs and income through culture. Rather, he wanted to safeguard the cultural autonomy of Brazil\u2019s development program,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Bola\u00f1o illustrates the difference in perspective using tax incentive laws as an example. \u201cLei Sarney, Furtado\u2019s brainchild, was designed to create the conditions for creativity to flourish. As he described it, the goal was for the butcher down the street to finance the local theater group. Subsequent laws, on the other hand, were more geared to financing large productions,\u201d he notes. One exception, says Bola\u00f1o, was \u201cPontos de Cultura,\u201d a cultural collectives program created by singer and musician Gilberto Gil during his term as Minister of Culture between 2003 and 2008.<\/p>\n

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Publius Virgilius \/ Folhapress<\/span><\/a> October 31, 1997, during his inauguration at the Brazilian Academy of LettersPublius Virgilius \/ Folhapress<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cFurtado can be described in many ways: as an interpreter of Brazil\u2019s formation; a historian of Brazilian and Latin American economic development; an underdevelopment theorist; a scholar of regional issues; a voice about the globalization of capital and possibilities in the periphery; or as a thinker of democracy,\u201d says Gilberto Bercovici a professor of economic law at the University of S\u00e3o Paulo (USP) and founder of the research group \u201cLaw and Underdevelopment: the Furtadian Challenge.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHis works are assigned as textbooks in programs on economic law, which explore the organization of economies, planning, and industrial and agricultural policy. Economic law governs how the economic process is structured,\u201d explains Bercovici. \u201cJurist Fabio Konder Comparato describes economic law as a tool for shaping the framework of the economic system. This was precisely Furtado\u2019s aim,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Costa Lima laments Furtado\u2019s lack of recognition as a thinker in international relations, \u201calthough he dealt with the very same concepts as other more widely read authors. Celso Furtado ventured into the field of international policy to expand the scope of issues being addressed,\u201d he notes, \u201can endeavor associated with post-colonial thinking.\u201d Costa Lima points to two aspects in particular that marked Furtado\u2019s work: his realization that, in pursuing development, peripheral nations could not simply attempt to reproduce the development patterns of central nations; and his advocacy for closer relations among underdeveloped countries, or \u201cSouth-South\u201d relations.<\/p>\n

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C\u00edcero Pr \/ Folhapress<\/span><\/a> Celso Furtado shaking hands with architect Oscar Niemeyer at a conference in 1987. Seated at the table is anthropologist Darcy RibeiroC\u00edcero Pr \/ Folhapress<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

In 1974, Furtado launched Economic Development: A Myth<\/em>, a book that explored what was then an unusual topic among economists\u2014the environment. He would later explain that he became convinced of the importance of ecology in the 1960s during his tenure as director at SUDENE. There, he realized that indigenous agriculture helped to protect rainforests in a way that modern mechanized farming did not. In their article, \u201cAs ideias de Celso Furtado sobre a quest\u00e3o ambiental\u201d (Celso Furtado and the environmental question),\u201d economists Renato Nataniel Wasques, Walter Luiz dos Santos J\u00fanior, and Danilo Duarte Brand\u00e3o note that the environmental issues Furtado raised and the approach he used in his book would later form the cornerstone of the modern concept of sustainable development.<\/p>\n

Besides underdevelopment, the other major concept Furtado advanced is the distinction between the center and periphery of the global economy, one of the pillars of the approach to economics he developed at ECLAC with Prebisch. At the \u201ccenter\u201d or \u201ccore\u201d are wealthy nations that master advanced technologies and produce goods with increasing returns to scale\u2014in other words, with revenues outgrowing the cost of inputs. At the periphery are countries specializing in low-technology products which, conversely, have decreasing returns to scale.<\/p>\n

Today, the center-periphery model has fallen into disuse among economists. But it has resurfaced elsewhere, says Paulo Gala, of the School of Economics at Funda\u00e7\u00e3o Getulio Vargas (FGV) in S\u00e3o Paulo. He cites, for example, the work of 2008 Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman in the area of economic geography. Krugman shows how a core-and-periphery structure emerges naturally in economies in which there are different goods, some with increasing and others with decreasing returns to scale. \u201cKrugman made a formal leap in our understanding of world trade, in a paper permeated by the idea of a center and a periphery,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Gala also points to more recent research in which physicists and economists specializing in complexity\u2014such as Chilean physicist Cesar Hidalg and Hungarian-American physicist Albert-L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Barabasi\u2014came to a similar conclusion in separate studies on international trade. \u201cIn complex networks, a core-periphery structure occurs naturally. Any network has a core and a periphery: the core has the most connected nodes, while periphery nodes have few connections,\u201d he explains.<\/p>\n

Gala notes how each of these different schools arrived at a center-periphery model through different routes. Furtado and Prebisch used a historical and documentary approach. Krugman is a pure microeconomics theorist who uses abstract models. Complexity theorists, in turn, took a strictly empirical route, analyzing large volumes of data on world trade. \u201cThey all came to the same conclusion, either empirically or formally, that the structure of world trade forms a center-and-periphery pattern,\u201d he says. \u201cThis vindicates the Latin American structuralists\u2019 claim that poorer countries could not achieve development within a pattern emanating from wealthy nations,\u201d he concludes.<\/p>\n

Scientific articles<\/strong>
\nCOSTA LIMA, Marcos.\u00a0A dimensa\u0303o internacional da obra de Celso Furtado<\/a>.\u00a0Revista de Cie\u0302ncias Sociais<\/strong>. Fortaleza, Vol. 51, no. 1, Mar.\/June, 2020, pp. 45\u201373.
\nWASQUES, Renato Nataniel; SANTOS J\u00daNIOR, Walter Luiz dos; BRAND\u00c3O, Danilo Duarte. \u201cAs ideias de Celso Furtado sobre a quest\u00e3o ambiental<\/a>\u201d.\u00a0Leituras de Economia Poli\u0301tica<\/strong>, Campinas, (28), pp. 41\u201358, Jan.\/June 2019.[\/bibliografia<\/p>\n

[bibliografia]Livros<\/strong>
\nAra\u00fajo, Victor Leonardo e Mattos, Fernando Augusto M. (organizers).\u00a0A Economia Brasileira de Get\u00falio a Dilma: Novas Interpreta\u00e7\u00f5es<\/em>. S\u00e3o Paulo:\u00a0Hucitec<\/strong>, in preprint.
\nBola\u00f1o, Cesar.\u00a0O Conceito de Cultura em Celso Furtado<\/em>. Salvador:\u00a0Editora UFBA<\/strong>, 2015.
\nGala, Paulo.\u00a0Complexidade Econ\u00f4mica<\/em>. Rio de Janeiro:\u00a0Contraponto<\/strong>, 2017.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One hundred years after his birth, concepts formulated by economist Celso Furtado remain influential in multiple fields","protected":false},"author":613,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[152],"tags":[225],"coauthors":[1619],"class_list":["post-383571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-retrospect","tag-economy"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/613"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=383571"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383571\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":384547,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383571\/revisions\/384547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=383571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=383571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=383571"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=383571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}