Celso Furtado

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Celso Furtado (right) 2004 with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva

Celso Furtado (born July 26, 1920 in Pombal ( Paraíba ), † November 20, 2004 in Copacabana (Rio de Janeiro) ) was a Brazilian economist . Furtado was an economist at the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean , where he was involved in the development of a structuralist economic theory in the 1950s alongside the Argentine Raúl Prebisch . Later he worked as an economics professor a. a. at the Paris Sorbonne , mainly with Latin American economic history . He held ministerial posts in two Brazilian governments . Celso Furtado is considered one of the most important Brazilian intellectuals of the 20th century.

life and work

Celso Furtado was born in Pombal in the northeastern Brazilian state of Paraíba . Furtado moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1939 , where he studied law and graduated from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) in 1944 . He then fought in the Brazilian armed forces in support of the Allies in Italy . From 1946 he received his doctorate at the Sorbonne on the economics of Brazil during the colonial era.

In 1949, Raúl Prebisch brought him to the newly established Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL) in Santiago de Chile . At CEPAL, Furtado and Prebisch developed an economic policy program for the industrial development of Latin America on the basis of the structuralist economic theory they founded .

In 1959 he returned to Brazil and became director of the Brazilian Development Bank . During this time he published a comprehensive treatise on Brazilian economic history ( Formação Econômica do Brasil ). For the development of structurally weak regions in northeastern Brazil, he designed the government agency Superintendencia de Desarrollo del Nordeste (Sudene), whose first director he was appointed by the Brazilian President Juscelino Kubitschek (1956–1961). João Goulart (1961–1964) appointed Furtado as Minister of Planning. During his development work, Furtado's views changed, who now recognized the failure of the Keynesian-influenced structuralism of CEPAL and attributed this to a neglect of internal social differences in the developing countries. In this respect, Furtado is also considered a representative of the dependence theory , whereby he emphasized the internal factors for development obstacles.

In 1964, Furtado helped found the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). In the same year he went into exile because of the military coup. He was appointed professor first to Yale , then to the Sorbonne , in Paris. He later returned to Brazil and was ambassador to the EC in Brussels (1985–1986). Under President José Sarney (1985–1990) he was again a minister in a Brazilian government, this time for the cultural department.

In 1997 Celso Furtado became a member of the Academia Brasileira de Letras , seat 11.

Shortly before his death in 2004, Celso Furtado was nominated as a Latin American candidate for the Nobel Prize in Economics .

Selected Works

  • Formação econômica do Brasil . RJ, Fundo de Cultura, 1959.
  • A economia latino-americana . SP, Editora Nacional, 1976.
  • Criatividade e dependência na civilização industrial . RJ, Paz e Terra, 1978.
  • Obra autobiográfica de Celso Furtado, 3 vol., Ed. De Rosa Freire d'Aguiar . SP, Paz e Terra, 1997.
  • O capitalismo global . SP, Paz e Terra, 1998.

literature

  • Mauro Boianovsky: "Celso Furtado (1920-2004)". In: Lawrence E. Blume, Steven N. Durlauf (Eds.): The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. 2nd Edition. Palgrave Macmillan, London 2008 ( preprint ; PDF; 29 kB).
  • Cristobal Kay: Celso Furtado: Pioneer of Structuralist Development Theory. In: Development and Change. 36, 6, 2005, pp. 1201-1207.
  • Philip Arestis , Malcolm C. Sawyer: A biographical dictionary of dissenting economists. 2nd Edition. Elgar, Aldershot 2000, ISBN 1-85898-560-9 , pp. 195-201.

Web links

supporting documents

  1. ↑ Bianca Többe Gonçalves: “Theory of development: from modernization to anti-modernism.” LIT Verlag Münster, 2005, ISBN 382588922X , p. 58.
predecessor Office successor
Aluísio Pimenta Minister of Culture
February 14, 1986 to July 28, 1988 		Hugo Napoleão do Rego Neto
personal data
SURNAME Furtado, Celso
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Furtado, Celso Monteiro (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Brazilian economist and diplomat
DATE OF BIRTH July 26, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Pombal
DATE OF DEATH November 20, 2004
Place of death Rio de Janeiro