A brief history of Brazil's growth

This chapter focuses on the Brazilian growth experience and begins with a brief overview of events that marked the country’s development from its discovery in 1500 to the 19th century. The chapter then divides the years between 1900 and 2008 into four periods, based on the methodology developed by Bai and Perron (1998, 2003) to identify structural breaks in statistical series. We identify regime changes in 1918, 1967 and 1980. Growth accounting is subsequently used to analyse the behaviour of productivity in the post-World War II period and suggests that high inflation might have been a reason for a decline in productivity between 1980 and the mid-1990s.