Uma análise do (sub)desenvolvimento brasileiro: um modelo de crescimento com distribuição de renda de regime "profit-led"

Abstract

The objective of our work was demonstrating that economic development has a notably distributive nature, spanning a sociocultural dimension, in which are inscribed the values and purposes that preside life in a given society, and another economic one, in which we observe the authentic distributive conflict in the output distribution. This dual perspective can be focused in the light of the process of capital accumulation, as the Classics used to do, and how the post-Keynesian literature of income distribution has done. Additionally, we aim at the particular analysis of the Brazilian case, taking the accumulation process as the object, depicted as its economic growth regime, and investigating, thus, the dynamics of output formation by the income method. At the historical level, we could show that this panorama is predominantly marked by high inequality and income concentration in Brazil, although this does not necessarily hinders its economic growth, from a technical point of view, even though it undoubtedly shapes the most relevant malformation in our underdevelopment. Not only the historical instruments allowed us to verify the picture of relevant social injustice denoted by a true socioeconomic apartheid, but also an analysis based on data, from statistics of concentration and measurement of income dispersion, as well as other information concerning our tax system, land structure, consumer and labor market corroborated this diagnosis. From the cultural perspective, in our view, and taking as reference the old institutionalism, this scenario derives from an emulative behavior of an elite, expressed as a desire of social and economic differentiation, which makes income concentration a purpose itself. This process has an unmistakable unfolding on conspicuous consumption and, therefore, on the phenomenon of mimicry, as identified by Celso Furtado. This author constitutes our greatest reference for the development of our practical analysis of the Brazilian growth regime, due to his elaboration of an authentic growth model with income distribution for our country. The hypotheses that we intend to test referred to the orientation of Brazilian economic growth by profits, characterizing an essentially "profit-led" dynamics, and the relation of the functional distribution of income with the capital-product ratio and the existence of a subsistence sector in our economy. In order to do so, we used an SVAR (Structural Vector Autoregressive), similar to that undertaken in Stockhammer and Onaran (2002). The results showed strong indicatives that Brazilian regime of economic growth is fundamentally oriented by the share of profits in the economy, which denotes high concentration and inequality in functional income distribution (with inexorable repercussions on personal distribution); and that the existence and persistence in time of a subsistence sector (with characteristics broadly wider than, a priori, the term could evoke) has an expressive repercussion on the share of wages, weakening workers’ bargaining power, thus, reinforcing this concentrating framework.