Regimes políticos, mediações sociais e trajetórias econômicas: alguns ensinamentos regulacionistas da divergência entre as economias brasileira e mexicana desde os anos 70

Resumo

This work tries to identify the weight of political factors in Brazil's and
l\/lexico's trajectory since the external debt crisis. The correlation between state
legitimating forms - patronisingly in the former and corporatively in the second
- and between economic policy choices - structuralist and monetarist - is apparent.
In this way, the priority given to external or internal adjustment (which
characterized the reponse given respectively by these two countries to the new
international context) is referred to the institutional forms of macroeconomic
regulation inherited from the import substitution industrialization period. Based
on this, the long term historical processes that took the political dynamics
of these two countries to draw two alternative development standards and to
configure diametrically opposed international insertion strategies are recovered.
If Mercosur should turn out to be a large common market, just like European
Community, Brazil would consolidate the possibility of grounding its
competitiveness in an endogenous growth dynamics, unlike México which,
belonging to Nafta, would see its growth prospects connected above all to international
subcontracting opportunities. Comparing the political and economical
forms which the former development standard of these countries underwent
and that took them to exhaustion, and also the responses to the debt
crisis, it becomes apparent the pressing need for a significant reduction of
wage discrepancies in order to come out of a vicious circle between internal
and external adjustments, from which none of them has really managed to escape.
The irreversibility of the divergence between these two countries must
be questioned having in mind the fragility of their bets. For México, the viability
of a growth model based on manufacture exportation has to be questioned by
the dilemma between growth or external disequilibrium which aggravates the
state legitimating crisis. For Brazil, the option for a development path that
would conciliate the need for economic opening and for the recovering of internal
market expansion and higher salaries movement is in abeyance until the
emergency of a new political framing that could allow for the adoption of a fiscal
reform giving the state the financial means for a keynesian economic policy.