On 21 March 2025, Rafael Rosa Cedro defended his PhD thesis on 'Policy Paradigms, Networks, and Practices: Analyzing change in the thinking about economic development in Brazil in the early 21st century (2001-2014) and its influences on policy and strategy making'
His research examined the thinking about economic development that has informed Brazil’s national-level policy and strategy making across time, especially in the period 2001-2014. Such thinking ranged from:
- assertions that early-21st-century Brazil remained essentially tied to the neoliberal frame that had prevailed since the 1990s (Palma, 2012; Vernengo, 2011; Filgueiras and Gonçalves, 2007
- claims that the government, at some point had begun following the prescriptions of a so-called 'new developmentalist' model (Moraes and Saad-Filho, 2012; Bresser-Pereira, 2011d)
- accusations that Dilma rehabilitated the state-activist economic development model of the 1964-1985 military regime
- an increasing incidence of references alluding to late economist Celso Furtado and aspects of the type of economic thinking he had represented before the 1964 military coup
Rewatch Rafael's defence introduction
