O novo desenvolvimentismo: uma crítica metodológica à luz da complexidade

Abstract

This article aims to make a critical review of the self-styled New-Developmentalism in the light of the concept of complex systems. Given it´s importance in the current academic debate about the nature of contemporary Brazilian development and the strategies for economic growth, it is an analysis of the endogenous conception and methodological nationalism upon which it is based. It is intended to highlight an important contradiction: the tendancy of the national development strategy to be anchored on an export-led growth regime for the middle-income countries, although apparently seeming to converge with the complexity approach in reality its based on reductionism which treats national economies as autonomous capitalist units. Foreign trade and financial transactions are treated as manipulable external variables and ignores the fact that international relations are largely constituents of the internal economic system that configures the dependent characteristics of the Brazilian economy. This conception puts in check the feasibility of the national project of the New-Developmentalism.