Tamás Szmrecsányi

O desenvolvimento da agroindústria canavieira do Brasil desde a Segunda Guerra Mundial

Assessmente of the evolution of Brazils sugarcane, sugar and ethanol production durng the alst fifty years, as well as of its slnfting spatial pattern after the last World War., Chronological account ofthe industrys main problems covering four sequential periods: World War II and its consequences (1939-1949), attempts of reinsertion in the international sugar markets (1950-1968), trends of sectorial concentration and modernization (1969-1974), and dislocations from sugar to ethanol and vice versa (1975-1989). The article ends with some succint considerations on the ethanol supply crisis of 1990.

The contributions of Celso Furtado (1920-2004) to development economics

Celso Furtado’s death at the end of 2004 marked both the loss of Brazil’s foremost economist of international standing and the disappearance of a very talented writer, theorist and historian, holder of a rich personal and intellectual biography. Together with three other authors, he had been one of the founders of modern Brazilian economic historiography, not only through his 1959 masterpiece Formacao Economica do Brasil 2 but also by way of his doctoral dissertation in economics, defended eleven years earlier at the University of Paris. From 1949 to 1958, as a member of the initial staff of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) in Santiago (Chile), he had worked in close cooperation with the Argentinian economist Raul Prebisch (1901 – 86), thus becoming one of the mentors of its Import Substituting Industrialization school of thought. Between 1958 and 1964, he occupied successively several important positions of his country’s public administration: director of the Brazilian National Economic Development Bank, head of the Economic Superintendence of Brazil’s underdeveloped northeastern region and Minister of Planning. During the twenty years of authoritarian military regime that followed, he lived and worked in exile – first in Chile and the United States and then in France, where he became the holder of a chair in economic development at the University of Paris. After Brazil’s redemocratization in the mid-1980s, he was named ambassador at the European Community in Brussels and later Minister of Culture in Brasilia, soon returning, however, to his academic activities. And in 1997, due to the number and quality of his writings, as well as for the stylistic brilliance of his prose (surely a rare

Periodization Problems in the Economic History of Science and Technology

Nowadays there is no doubt about the interrelation between and mutual dependence of scientific and technical progress on the one hand and economic development on the other. Since this has not always been so, it has become necessary to define and to justify the time from which we may conceive an economic history of science and technology. This problem is easier to solve in relation to the latter than with regard to the former: the relationships between the scientific and the economic systems of any society are not only much more recent than those of the economy with its underlying techniques, but they are also predominantly indirect, usually mediated by or linked to some form of technological development. Technology acquired a scientific basis with the Second Industrial Revolution, whose nature however can only be understood when contrasted with that of the First one as well as with the processes of the professionalization of research and of the transition from natural philosophy and natural history to the contemporary scientific disciplines, both of which took place from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. KEY Classification-JEL: N73, 030, 039, 123