Brazil's State-Owned Enterprises A Case Study of the State as Entrepreneur

This book analyzes the performance of Brazil's large state-owned enterprises. The Brazilian economic system encourages private enterprise, but the government itself owns and operates such critical industries as petrochemicals, steel, electricity, and telecommunications. The Brazilian state has assumed the role of an entrepreneur as a pragmatic means of speeding up the process of economic growth. Though relatively few in number, the state-owned enterprises have grown rapidly in size and scale of operations relative to private firms. The author examines the economic and financial performance of these enterprises in terms of their contribution to economic growth. He concludes that in Brazil they have been effective substitutes for private investment in a number of strategic industries and that their ability to assemble large amounts of capital, to attract skilled managers, and to earn reasonable profits permitted the Brazilian economy to grow more rapidly during the 1960s and 1970s than would have been the case in their absence. He argues that much of the performance is due to the size and dynamism of the Brazilian economy, which allowed these capital-intensive enterprises to realize economies of large-scale production not achievable in smaller countries. But the Brazilian government's policies toward its state-owned enterprises have also been important in avoiding poor performance.