| This study is an investigation of the impacts of the export-oriented growth of Brazil's manufacturing industry on the politics of that country's entrepreneurs, from the late 1960s to the late 1980s.;The effects of this industrial export drive on local capitalists have not yet been studied and my interest in this topic is basically aimed at figuring how business groups have been politically influenced by that early outward reorientation of import-substitution industrialization, including as a way of gaining better insights on the politics of transitions toward open economies.;The analysis is focused on three industrial sectors that were differently stimulated towards engaging in export activities, the textile, the automotive and the paper and cellulose industry.;On the one hand, the investigation indicates that the successful outward oriented drive of Brazil's industry stimulated the reproduction of the subordinate-corporatist practices, typical of the import-substitution phase, in the three sectors studied here. In different occasions, for distinct reasons, entrepreneurs involved with export activities tried to influence the process of policy-making and/or attempted to assure particular benefits from public authorities, through short-term, narrow demands, in a dispersed way, as they used to do before.;On the other hand, and more importantly, this study also shows that Brazil's export-oriented growth of the manufacturing industry stimulated entrepreneurs from the three sectors to engage into absolutely new, more autonomous collective actions targeted at encompassing and durable supportive policies for their sectors, possibly like a sectoral corporatism.;These outcomes represent a very important change in the politics of business in Brazilian history, and they are finally assessed in face of the country's main current development challenges.;Focusing on the question of Brazil's competitive integration into the world economy, it can be added that those fresh collective actions possibly were a lost opportunity for building an active framing of this integration, given that most governments of the 1990s have exclusively relied on a neoliberal-oriented approach to the country's economic problems, largely restricting the room for planning. |
