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Carlos Pereira Machado Junior

M.S., International Management
School of Business and Law
Wednesday 13 December 2017

Explaining Welfare Expansion in Brazil: Globalization, Economic Policies and Social Protection (EWEB)

“If the people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists – to protect them and to promote their common welfare – all else is lost. Barack Obama 

The main task of this project was to conduct a literature review. The main purpose is to understand the historical path followed by Brazil to be able to assess the impact that liberalization, globalization and political mobilization had for welfare state expansion.

M.S, Student / Research Assistant: Carlos Pereira Machado Junior
Project Supervisor: Gibrán Cruz-Martínez

The Brazilian constitution determines that the government has an obligation to provide all its citizens with equal access, rights, obligations and opportunities in life – such as security, education and health. Since the South American giant has its fair share of people below the income poverty threshold, it is crucial for the government to ensure the expansion and development of its social welfare system. However, how the social welfare system expands or shrinks depends on many different economic, political, sociological, and even historical factors, which were further explored and discussed throughout the research.

In this project, we gathered as much data as possible from existent literature in Portuguese publications. The added-value of this project is that it breaks the language barriers to bring Latin-American and African intellectual reflections to English-speaking audiences. Papers were collected using ORIA (search engine from the UIA) and Google Scholar. According to historical institutionalism, understanding how the social welfare in Brazil has expanded or shrink throughout the years is helpful to predict the evolution of welfare institutions in the present and future. 

After collecting the data, the information was divided by each concept/variable and input in an excel file. Afterwards we drafted a literature review paper. One of the most important sections is the one which includes our reflections on the contrast between what the English, Spanish and Portuguese language literature says about the explanatory factors.

I am thankful to UIA and to Gibran for the great opportunity to be part of this amazing project, which made me understand the current situation of the Brazilian social state. Finally yet importantly, the project might be extended to examine each region of Brazil, instead of the country as whole. Given the opportunity, I would be delighted to take part on it again.