The paper argues that in developing countries the changing political and social relations so as the technical progress create a systematic tendency for a dynamic disequilibrium between con-sumption and investment. Under these conditions, the continued growth requires a macroeconomic policy directed to increase the rate of accumulation through a reduction in the aggregate consump-tion of both capitalist and working classes. Politically this kind of regulatory policy should be seen as an opportunity for the working class to increase its share in the wealth ownership.

This paper analyses the implication of the increasing transfer of resources to external sector on the capacity of investment of Brazilian economy. After 1983 Brazilian economy is transferring an increasing volume of resources which attained more than 5% of the GDP in the last two years, contrasting with the decade of 70 when the absortion of external saving attained about 2% of the GCP. As consequence of this external constraint the rate of investment has ped from 26% of GDP in the 70’s to an estimated level of 16% in the last years. The paper, using a standard ma-croeconomic model, establishes the relationship between alternatives rates of transfer of resour-ces, rate of domestic savings, capital-output ratio with the target rate of growth of the Brazilian economy.

From 1974-1985 the Brazilian inflation rate showed a tendency to grow as opposed to the decli-ning tendency observed in the 1964-1973 period. The causes of this resurgence of inflation, its impact, and the policies used to control it are analyzed in this work, using two-approaches which result from two different schools of thought: the “classical orthodox tradition” which sees infla-tion as being caused by excessive increases in the money supply; and the “neo-structuralist school for which inflation is considered basically the result from the monopoly power of corporations, trade unions, and the state, culminating in the concepts of inertial inflation. The failure of orthodox school in both its diagnosis and its inflationary control policies led to author to conclude, through an analysis of the institutional structure of Brazil, and the conduct of its components that the neo-structuralist explanation come closer to the root of the problem, advocating the need to adopt “heterodox” policies. The author also presents a preliminary evaluation of the “Cruzado Plan” — the program of economic stabilization — inspired by neo-structuralist ideas, which was implemented in Brazil on February 28, 1986.

Relying on the analysis of the accumulation trends in the car and textile industries, this paper pretends to determine the multiform process of adaptation and reaction to the crisis in a semiindustrialized economy, as the Brazilian one, strongly reached by recession. In that sense, relations between the process of capital accumulation, technological changes, and new forms of workforce mobilization are analyzed.

The aim of Hirschman’s essay is to confront the tendency of economic theory to economic arguments, postulates and assumptions. According to him, various realms of economic enquiry calls for complication and he tries to answer for this necessity in three different ways, all of them challenging the assumption of a self interested and rational individual who chooses freely between alternative courses of action after calculating their costs and benefits. First, he proposes a distinction within the concept of preferences between first and second order ones and argues that this distinction is important for the analysis of its pattern of change. Only assuming that human beings have the ability to formulate metapreferences (or second order preferences) it would be possible to illuminate the varied nature of this pattern and differentiate, for example, between a change that is purely impulsive and publicity oriented and other which is the result of a process of acquisition of new social or personal values. Second, he proposes distinction within the concept of human activities and explores the idea of the existence of some of them that are noninstrumental, that is, which ends are not predictable and not related with preliminaries efforts. These noninstrumental activities, in spite of its fre-quently painful character have the quality of being striving and attaining. The point Hirschman makes is that economics is growing so fast its ambition that it becomes of increasing importance to incorporate into its scope this other kind of human action, extremely useful, for instance, in stud-ying public policies or in studying the oscillations between individualistic and private oriented actions and actions in pursuit of public happiness. Third, Hirschman tries to complicate economics by reintroducing into its realm the idea that economic system needs, to function, as well as of others factors of production, of a kind of moral input. In sum, to complicate the economic discourse means to accept and take into account the idea that human action can be moral, full of values and sometimes noninstrumental.