Book Chapter
Inclusive growth without structural transformation?

Through a fast process of urbanization Brazil, until then a country with most workers in the agricultural sector, went through a strong process of structural transformation that lasted almost four decades until the economic opening, in the beginning of the 1990s.

For the same period income inequality remained practically stable and at high levels, only falling in the end of the 1990s. This chapter analyses the Brazilian experience in three periods from a historical point of view: 1950–64, 1964–94, and 1994–2011.

This analysis brings evidence that the combination of an import substitution system based on tariff and non-tariff barriers to foreign products, combined with low investment in human capital, made the structural transformation process not correlated with inclusive growth.