LUIZ CARLOS BRESSER-PEREIRA
(Two pages bio, December 2010)
Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira is emeritus professor of Getulio Vargas Foundation, where he
teaches economics, political theory and social theory. He is president of the Centro de
Economia Política (Economic Political Center) and editor of Brazilian Journal of Political
Economy since 1981. He writes a bi-weekly column at Folha de S.Paulo. In 2010 he was
awarded a Doctorate Honoris Causa by the University of Buenos Aires. He was Minister
of Finance, of Federal administration and State Reform, and of Science and Technology.
His major intellectual influences come from Marx, Weber, Keynes, and from Latin
American structuralism. His more significant contributions on economic theory are related
to the model of growth and distribution originated from the falling tendency of the rate of
profit, the theory of the inertial inflation (with Yoshiaki Nakano), the basis of a
structuralist development macroeconomics, the tendency to the cyclical overvaluation of
the exchange rate, and the methodological critique to neoclassical economics. In political
and social theory he contributed on the rise of the technobureaucratic or professional class,
the historical models of State, the relations between the nation or civil society and the
State, the capitalist revolution model of democratic transition and consolidation, and the
structural model of public management reform. In his interpretation of Brazil, he
combined the analysis of economic models of development and the corresponding political
pacts or coalitions. The emergence of industrial entrepreneurs and of the public
bureaucracy and the transition to democracy are themes to which he offered special
contributions.
Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira was born in São Paulo, in 1934. His bachelor’s degree is in
Law by the University of São Paulo - USP, his MBA, by Michigan State University, his
PhD and Livre Docência in Economics, by University of São Paulo. He was visiting
professor on economic development at the University of Paris I (1978), and on political
theory at USP’s Department of Political Science (2002/03). He was also visiting fellow at
Oxford University (1999 and 2001) and at USP’s Institute of Advanced Studies (1989).
Since 2003 he teaches regularly a one month seminar at the École d’Hautes Études en
Sciences Sociales, Paris.
From 1963 to 1982, while keeping his academic activities, he was vice-president of the
Pão de Açúcar Group. In 1983, with the election of the first democratic governor to São
Paulo –Franco Montoro – he became president of the state bank of São Paulo, and two
years later, chief of staff of the governor. In April 1987, in the aftermath of Cruzado Plan’
crisis, he became Finance Minister of Brazil, and proposed a solution to the 1980s debt
crisis that later turned into the Brady Plan. In the Fernando Henrique Cardoso
administration he was Minister of Federal Administration and Reform of the State (19951998), where he initiated the 1995 Public Management Reform, and, in 1999, Minister of
Science and Technology. Since July 1999 he is fully dedicated to academic life. He is
member of the board of administration of several non-profit organizations and of Lelis
Blanc. Most of his work is available in his website existing since 1996,
www.bresserpereira.org.br.
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Some of his books: Development and Crisis in Brazil (1968/2003), A Sociedade Estatal e
a Tecnoburocracia (1980), The Theory of Inertial Inflation, with Yoshiaki Nakano (1984),
Lucro, Acumulação e Crise (1986), A Crise do Estado (1992), Economic Reforms in New
Democracies, with Adam Przeworski and José María Maravall (1993), Reforma do Estado
para a Cidadania (1998), Democracy and Public Management Reform (2004), and
Mondialisation et Compétition (2009), which has also been published in Portuguese,
English and Spanish.
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