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Commentary
This project was undertaken with financial support from the Banco Nacional de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social (BNDES) through a grant from its Project Structuring Fund (Fundo de Estruturação de Projetos do BNDES, or FEP), FEP 03/2011. The results are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not reflect the opinion of BNDES. The authors wish to thank our research assistants, Graziella Magalhães Candido de Castro, Guilherme Byrro Lopes, Gustavo Foresto Crispim, Luiz Henrique Pacheco and Pedro Henrique Navarrete. We dedicate this article to the memory of our colleague, Maurício Jorge Pinto de Souza.
Introduction
This article offers a critical analysis of scholarship produced about Brazil's National Bank for Economic and Social Development (BNDES) since its founding in 1952. BNDES has performed an important, if changing and sometimes controversial, role in Brazil's economic development over the past 60 years, especially as provider of long-term finance. The bank has been a major financial instrument of economic policy, but its actions and roles have been determined by how the major obstacles to Brazilian development have been defined and by the macroeconomic conditions in which it has operated.
The origin of BNDES lies in the broad transformations that occurred in the world economy between World War I and II when the disruption of international commercial and financial flows caused many countries to promote domestic economic development through incentives, protectionist policies and preferential access to credit. In Latin American countries, finance for this expansion could not come from the private banking system, which focused on short-term credit, nor from the capital markets, because of their inherent weakness. Many countries created public development banks to support industrial and infrastructural expansion. The experience of the developed countries in the creation of government banks like the United States' Export-Import bank offers evidence of the broad acceptance of this institutional innovation. These institutions continued to operate, and indeed even broadened their scope, after World War II.1
It was in this context that BNDES was created and gradually took on a major role in Brazilian investment finance. In spite of the centrality of the bank to the Brazilian economy, however, there has been no systematic analysis of the scholarship regarding it. This article presents a comprehensive analysis of literature produced about BNDES...