Padrão de financiamento e o ciclo da economia brasileira de 2004 - 2016

Abstract

According to the Post Keynesian approach, investment and its financing take place within the Finance-Investment-Savings-Funding circuit. However, in developing economies the financial system is neither developed nor functional, requiring alternative financial arrangements other than the traditional finance-funding mechanisms in order to enable and sustain investment. In Brazil, these alternative arrangements have always corresponded to the so-called internal, public and external funds. The main objective of this thesis is to analyze the constitution and performance of these three investment finance funds in Brazil between 2004 and 2016 and thus verify the hypothesis that they acted as alternative financial arrangements to the traditional finance and funding mechanisms in order to finance the Brazilian economy cycle between 2004 and 2016. Focusing on this objective, this work assumes the Post-Keynesian approach regarding to macroeconomic policy prescriptions, conventional economic agents’ behavior, the decision to invest and the financing of investment. Furthermore the implemented macroeconomic policies and their relation to formed conventions (shared beliefs) and the constitution of alternative investment financing funds are analyzed, aiming to identify the role of macroeconomic policies and funds in the 2004-16 cycle. Results corroborate the main hypothesis that domestic, public and external funds remained as the main sources of investment and growth financing in Brazil. Two others hypothesis were also corroborated by this research: i) the cycle phase observed between 2004 and 2010 was export-and-consumption led due to an former idle capacity existing in the economy, which accommodated contradictions of macroeconomic policy and mitigated the pressure on aggregated investment and its financing funds, enabling the upward phase of the Brazilian economic cycle; ii) between 2011 and 2016, the downward phase of the cycle resulted from changes in the composition of public and domestic investment financing funds, related to a shrinkage in domestic consumption growth and to a deterioration of the external scenario. Analysis of the three mentioned funds, whose constitution was linked to national and international economic conjuncture and to domestic economic policies, revealed the unstable and unsustainable nature of the financing sources in the country. These were still strongly dependent on the State's role as main financer and manager of financing mechanisms, revealing that besides innovations and advances in the Brazilian financial system, the usual financing pattern remains the same as it used to be in previous periods.