Bringing the analysis of Brazil's economic performance up to date, Baer's classic text remains the only book in English to provide a thorough historical, statistical, and institutional description of the Brazilian economy.
Werner Baer was an American economist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the Jorge Lemann Professor of Economics. He received his bachelor's degree from Queen's College in 1953, and a Master's and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1955 and 1958 respectively. His research centered on Latin America's industrialization and economic development, especially of Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) and Brazil.
This book has been one of my favorite resources in research on the economic development of Brazil. The book revisits what happened in Brazil from the turn of the century forward. So much of what happened in Brazil differs from other nations. It is very difficult to understand Brazil from a specific point in time or area. You really need to know the entire history of what happened. This book provides that. It also gives fantastic details on what exactly happened with each new policy that was implemented. Most pieces fail to do this seemingly basic work. Quite a few pieces get caught up in the politics to the point that they provide unfair accounts of what happened. This book, thought it provides some commentary on what happened in the political sense, primarily gives you the facts and connects those facts, sans all the opinion and vibrato of other pieces.