Celso Furtado

Celso Monteiro Furtado was a Brazilian economist and one of the most distinguished intellectuals of the 20th century. His work focuses on development and underdevelopment and on the persistence of poverty in peripheral countries throughout the world. He is viewed, along with Raúl Prebisch, as one of the main formulators of economic structuralism, an economics school that is largely identified with CEPAL, which achieved prominence in Latin America and other developing regions during the 1960s and 1970s and sought to stimulate economic development through governmental intervention, largely inspired on the views of John Maynard Keynes. As a politician, Furtado was appointed Minister of Planning (Goulart government) and Minister of Culture (Sarney government). He was born in Pombal, a city set in the semi-arid region of the state of Paraíba, in 1920, and graduated in medicine at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in 1943. He was conscripted to the Brazilian Expeditionary Force to fight in Italy, during World War II, alongside the Allies. Seeing countries destroyed in post-war Europe had a profound impact on him, leading to the decision that he would study Economics: he enrolled in a doctorate program at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), in 1946, and presented a thesis on the economy of Brazil during the colonial period. In 1949, he moved to Santiago, Chile, where he joined the team of the newly created United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (best known by its Latin American acronym, CEPAL), which was then headed by Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch. While working at CEPAL, Furtado and Prebisch were decisive for the formulation of socioeconomic policies for the development of Latin America which emphasized industrialization and import substitution. Upon his return to Brazil in 1959, he published his most famous book – The Economic Growth of Brazil: A Survey from Colonial to Modern Times (in Portuguese: Formação Econômica do Brasil) – and was appointed the director of the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDE) in charge of issues concerning states of the northeastern region, which are poor and face chronic droughts and desertification. He also founded the Superintendency for the Development of the Northeast (SUDENE), a federal agency that aimed to promote the economic and social development of the region. He was later appointed Minister of Planning by President João Goulart, and played a key role in the design and implementation of the Triennial Plan, a reformist economic program that sought to reduce inflation, balance the balance of payments, and promote income redistribution and structural changes. However, his plan was interrupted by the 1964 military coup, which forced him into exile. He lived in France, the United States, and Chile, where he continued his academic and intellectual activities. He returned to Brazil in 1979, after the amnesty law, and became involved in the democratic transition. He was elected to the Federal Senate in 1982, representing the state of Paraíba, but resigned in 1985 to accept the invitation of President José Sarney to become Minister of Culture. He resigned in 1988, after a disagreement with Sarney over the constitutional reform. He then devoted himself to writing books and articles, as well as participating in public debates and conferences. He died of heart failure in 2004, at the age of 84, in Rio de Janeiro. He is considered one of the most important and influential Brazilian economists and intellectuals, and one of the main contributors to the development of Latin American economic thought.