Celso Furtado

Celso Furtado ( born July 26 1920 in Pombal ( Paraiba ), † 20 November 2004 Copacabana (Rio de Janeiro) ) was a Brazilian economist. Furtado was an economist with the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, where he was involved in the drafting of a structuralist economic theory in the 1950s next to the Argentinean Raul Prebisch. Later he worked as a professor of economics, inter alia, at the Sorbonne in Paris, especially in Latin American economic history. In two Brazilian governments, he held ministerial posts. 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 in 1939 to Rio de Janeiro, where he studied law and graduated in 1944 graduated at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro ( UFRJ ). After that, he fought at the Brazilian armed forces in support of the Allies in Italy. At the Sorbonne, he received his doctorate in 1946 on the economics of Brazil in colonial times.

In 1949, he was brought by Raul Prebisch to the newly established Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean ( ECLAC) in Santiago de Chile. At the CEPAL Furtado and Prebisch developed an economic program for the industrial development of Latin America on the basis of of them justified structuralist economic theory.

In 1959 he returned to Brazil and became director of the Brazilian Development Bank. During this time he published a comprehensive treatise on the 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 ), as its first director, he was by the Brazilian President Juscelino Kubitschek ( 1956-1961 ) appointed. João Goulart (1961-1964) appointed Furtado to the Planning Minister. During its developmental activities, Furtado's views, the now noted the failure of Keynesian influenced structuralism ECLAC and the back led to a neglect of the internal social differences in the developing countries walked. Furtado is also consistent as a representative of the dependency theory, but while emphasizing the internal factors for development obstacles.

Furtado 1964 was involved in the founding of the international organization the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD ). In the same year he went into exile because of the military coup. It was only after Yale, then a professor at the Sorbonne, Paris. Later he returned to Brazil and was ambassador to the EU in Brussels ( 1985-1986). Under President José Sarney (1985-1990), he was again Minister in a Brazilian government, this time for the culture section.

Celso Furtado in 1997 a member of the Academia Brasileira de Letras, seat was 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 de Celso Furtado autobiográfica, 3 vol. , Ed de Rosa Freire d' Aguiar. SP, Paz e Terra, 1997.
  • O capitalismo globally. SP, Paz e Terra, 1998.

Secondary literature

  • Mauro Boianovsky: " CELSO FURTADO (1920-2004) ". In: Lawrence E. Blume and Steven N. Durlauf (ed.): The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd edition (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) ( see as a PDF Preprint CELSO FURTADO ( 1920-2004 ), PDF; 29 kB).
  • Cristobal Kay: " Celso Furtado: Pioneer of structuralist Development Theory. " In: Development and Change 36 (6): 1201-1207 ( 2005).
  • Philip Arestis and Malcolm C. Sawyer ". A biographical dictionary of dissenting economists " 2nd edition, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2000, ISBN 1858985609, pp. 195-201.
Raúl Prebisch Structuralist economics Legal science Integrated Authority File
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