Distribution in Late Development: The Political Economy of the Kuznets Curse in Brazil

Marc Morgan and Pedro Souza

No unige:185943, Working Papers from University of Geneva, Paul Bairoch Institute of Economic History

Abstract: This paper proposes a novel assessment of the Kuznets curve for an underdeveloped country engaging in rapid late development. We mobilize new long-run data for Brazil, combining surveys, administrative records, and national accounts statistics, to compute macro-consistent income shares and other distributional indicators since the 1920s. Our estimates show a more nuanced picture for the traditional Kuznets hypothesis than what the existing literature has suggested. The major complication for the standard narrative lies in the period roughly between 1950 and 1964, for which existing estimates are either too infrequent, not disaggregated enough, or incomplete to be able to offer a coherent analysis. Given the political and institutional changes that followed, we argue that this period holds the key to what we term the Kuznets curse —the tendency in late-developing countries, according to Kuznets, for endogenous social conflicts linked to rapid structural change to be resolved by authoritarian regimes that ensure adherence to the high-savers accumulation model. We explain the political economy of the Kuznets curse through a narrative approach that combines structuralist development economics with a neorealist approach to institutional change, making use of public discourses and debates among policy-makers and intellectual elites.

Keywords: Distribution; Late development; Political economy; Kuznets; Brazil (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 D33 E64 J31 N36 O1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43
Date: 2025
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-lam and nep-pol
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.wider.unu.edu/bibcite/reference/241839

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gnv:wpaper:unige:185943

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Geneva, Paul Bairoch Institute of Economic History Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jean-Blaise Claivaz ().