How Markets Reshape States: Public Debt and Neoliberalism in Brazil

Teresa Ruas Coelho (Universidade Federal de Sergipe)

Public debt has been an important object of political disputes in Brazil for several decades. In the 1980s, the country was no exception to the generalized foreign debt crisis in Latin America. Since then, the Brazilian public debt has become mostly domestic, but it has continued to be one of the leading issues in the country’s economic policy. How did public debt become a problem in Brazil, and how is this process related with the implementation of a neoliberal development pattern in the country? The dissertation focuses on the efforts of neoliberal actors who perceive themselves as “revolutionaries,” agents of the modernization of Brazilian public finances. These actors actively seek to construct a new economic reality and implement a technique of governing this reality, based on a set of practices and devices that constitute the focus of the analysis. This network of actors and devices is traced using a qualitative methodology to analyze a corpus of institutional documents, public archives, and news and academic/biographical publications of relevant actors. The research is funded by Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES).