Maria da Conceição Tavares Tribute From Carlos Aguiar de Medeiros

Maria da Conceição Tavares – born in Portugal and naturalized Brazilian in 1957 – exerted an extraordinary influence on heterodox economic thought and the debate on development and economic policy in the country. She also exercised great academic leadership in the formation and development of postgraduate programs such as those at the Institute of Economics at UNICAMP and UFRJ. A notable polemicist, she joined the PT and was elected a deputy in the 1990s.

Her intellectual contribution to Brazilian industrialization emerged from the publication in 1972 of her classic work “From Import Substitution to Financial Capitalism”, a book grounded in the structuralist thinking approach of the Economic Commission of Latin America (ECLAC) developed by Raul Prebisch, Aníbal Pinto and Celso Furtado. Through the 1970s, she wrote “Accumulation of Capital and Industrialization in Brazil” (1974) and “Cycle and Crisis” (1978), which also critically reviewed her own ideas and the tradition of structuralist thought of ECLAC.

These works sought to reinterpret Brazilian industrialization, incorporating the seminal contributions of Marx, Keynes, Kalecki, Schumpeter, Steindl and Sylos-Labini alongside great historians such as Braudel and Hobsbawm. For young economists and postgraduate students, one of Conceição Tavares’ main contributions was the stimulus to read great authors and appreciate their relevance for understanding the problems of Brazilian industrialization. Along with the issues of capital accumulation, income distribution, and technical progress, Tavares presented an alternative not only to the conventional orthodox vision but also to ECLAC’s own structuralist thought tradition, highlighting problems of accumulation in semi-industrialized economies with transnationalized oligopolies, while retaining its historical-structural method. In the 1980s, Tavares published “The Resumption of North American Hegemony” (1985), investigating US economic power and the might of the dollar in international relations. This article instigated a broad reflection and inspired a postgraduate program on International Political Economy at the UFRJ Institute of Economics.

Maria da Conceição Tavares undoubtedly established herself as the most fruitful and brilliant economist in the country and with her irreverent and courageous intellectual attitude she continues to win “hearts and minds” among young academics.