Speaker: Pedro Loureiro (University of Cambridge)

Abstract: Pedro will talk discuss the scope and limitations of reformist development strategies through an analysis of the achievements and the shortcomings of the governments of the Brazilian Workers’ Party (PT) (2003-2016).

Reviewing the articulation of the PT’s macroeconomic, industrial and distributive policies, it is shown that they did promote growth and reduce income inequality, but they were incapable of transforming the deeper constraints of the economies. As a result, growth and redistribution led to an accumulation of fragilities that the development strategy could not overcome in the first years of the 2010s.

It is argued that the political strategy of the PT, based on piecemeal reform without confronting established (capitalist) interests, was inherently incapable of overcoming this stalemate. Instead, under a worsening international scenario and with tightening constraints, the party’s continued attempts at pragmatic class conciliation would only alienate their constituencies without political or economic gains. The conclusions suggest that reformist development strategies can manage the ‘middle-income trap’ in more or less progressive ways, but not launch a sustained process of inclusive catching-up.

*If you are external to King's and would like to attend this event, please contact the event organiser directly.

Pedro Loureiro is a lecturer in Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge. He holds a BA in Economics (UFMG – Belo Horizonte, Brazil), MSc in Economics ( Unicamp – Campinas, Brazil) and PhD in Economics (SOAS).

Pedro is primarily a political economist, but at the heart of his work, there is a commitment to interdisciplinarity and pluralism, with interest ranging wide across the social sciences. His recent work has assessed how the strategies of the ‘Pink Tide’ governments – the left-of-centre parties that were in power in Latin America roughly during the 2000s – were capable or not of upgrading the structures of their economies, reducing multidimensional inequality, and launching an inclusive, sustainable process of development. This encompasses an assessment, comparison and critique of the development strategies from different vantage points, ranging from their approach to economic transformation to the class politics that sustained and constrained these strategies.

Currently, he is also working on how inequality in Brazil is structured in and through class, race, and gender, and how this has changed or not during the Workers’ Party (PT) governments. One of his other central research interests is the measurement of inequality.