40

BRAZIL
Marilia Coutinho and Simon Schwartzman

Brazil is a newcomer in modern scientific and technological activities. Its

contemporary scientific and technological institutions were mainly estab-
lished after the higher education reform of 1968.1 Between 1500 and 1808
Brazil was a colony in the Portuguese Empire, which did not allow the
establishment of universities or research institutions in its possessions, as the
Spanish had in other parts of America. Still, the region was the subject of
interest and curiosity by European travelers and naturalists, who produced
detailed descriptions and pictorial representations of its fauna, flora, inhab-
itants, and landscape.2

COLONIAL AND IMPERIAL SCIENCE

In 1808 the Portuguese royal court moved to Rio de Janeiro, fleeing the
invasion of Napoleon’s troops in Europe, and established the first higher
education and research institutions in the old colony – a military and
engineering school, two schools of medicine, two schools of law, a botanical
garden, an astronomical observatory, a museum of natural history, and

1
This chapter is based on Simon Schwartzman, “Struggling to Be Born: The Scientific Community in
Brazil,” Minerva, 16 (1978), 545–80.
2
Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira, José Paulo Monteiro Soares, and Cristina Ferrão, Viagem Ao Brasil de
Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira: A Expedição Philosophica Pelas Capitanias Do Pará, Rio Negro, Mato
Grosso e Cuyabá, 3 vols. (Petrópolis: Kapa Editorial, 2006); William Joel Simon, Scientific Expeditions
in the Portuguese Overseas Territories, 1783–1808, and the Role of Lisbon in the Intellectual-Scientific
Community of the Late Eighteenth Century (Lisbon: Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical,
1983); André Thevet, Les Singvlaritez de La France Antarctiqve, Avtrement Nommée Amerique: & de
Plusieurs Terres & Isles Decouuertes de Nostre Temps (Paris: Chez les heritiers de Maurice de la Porte,
1557); Gabriel Soares Sousa, Francisco Adolfo Varnhagen, and Visconde Porto Seguro, Tratado
Descritivo do Brasil em 1587 (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1971); Willem Piso and
Georg Marcgrave, Historia Naturalis Brasiliae (Amsterdam: Joannes de Laet, 1648); Roderick
J. Barman, “The Forgotten Journey: Georg Heinrich Langsdorff and the Russian Imperial
Scientific Expedition to Brazil, 1821–1829,” Terrae Incognitae, 3 (1971), 67–96.

799
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 800 Marilia Coutinho and Simon Schwartzman
a mineralogical collection.3 In 1822 Brazil became formally independent, first
as a monarchy ruled by the heirs of the Portuguese royal family and after 1889
as a Republic. British influence in Brazilian foreign trade and foreign
policy was dominant until at least the First World War.4 However,
French cultural influence was much stronger, stimulated by several gov-
ernment-sponsored scientific, cultural, and military missions.5 D. Pedro II,
Brazil’s Emperor from 1840 to 1899, had a personal interest in science.6 He
was a member of the French Académie des Sciences, kept contact and gave
support to scientists abroad, and invited European and North American
scientists to lead or work in new or renewed scientific institutions such as
the Imperial Museum (Fritz Müller, 1821–97; Hermann von Ihering,
1850–1930; Carl August Wilhelm Schwack, 1848–94; Émil August
Goeldi, 1859–1917; Louis Couty, 1854–1888), the Imperial Geological
Commission (Charles F. Hartt, 1840–78; Orville Adalbert Derby,
1851–1915), and the Astronomical Observatory in Rio de Janeiro
(Emmanuel Liais, 1826–1900; Louis Ferdinand Cruls, 1848–1908; Henri
Charles Morize, 1860–1930).
The Brazilian economy was based on slave plantations until 1888, with
most of the population living in rural areas and with no access to formal
education. Portugal did not participate in the social and intellectual trans-
formations associated with the growth of science and the modernization of
the European universities since the Protestant reform, and its main
University, Coimbra, resisted the introduction of modern scientific thinking
until the institutional reforms of Prime Minister D. Sebastião José de
Carvalho e Melo, Marquis of Pombal, who reduced the power of the
Church, introduced the teaching of experimental physics, chemistry, and
natural history, and sought to bring to Portugal the values of rationality and
secularism of the European Enlightenment. Pombal’s reform was an earnest
effort to modernize the university and to bring Portugal abreast of Europe in
economic, technological, and cultural matters. Under Pombal, the Jesuits
were expelled from the Portuguese Empire; the teaching of scholastic
philosophy was banned; and the University of Coimbra was enriched by
a school of mathematics and natural philosophy, which included labora-
tories of chemistry, physics, pharmacy, and anatomy staffed by foreign-born

3
Simon Schwartzman, A Space for Science the Development of the Scientific Community in Brazil
(University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991).
4
Alan K. Manchester, British Preeminence in Brazil: Its Rise and Decline: A Study in European
Expansion (New York: Octagon Books, 1964); Alan K. Manchester, “The Transfer of the
Portuguese Court to Rio de Janeiro,” in Conflict and Continuity in Brazilian History, ed. Henry
H. Keith, and S. F. Edwards (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1969), pp. 148–83;
Richard Graham, Britain and the Onset of Modernization in Brazil 1850–1914 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1972).
5
Mônica Leite, L’Influence Intellectuelle Française au Brésil: Contribution a l’étude d’une Politique
Culturelle (1886–1930) (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2001).
6
Roderick J. Barman, Citizen Emperor: Pedro II and the Making of Brazil, 1825–91 (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 1999).

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 Brazil 801
7
teachers, mostly Italian. One of the founding fathers of Brazil’s indepen-
dence, José Bonifácio Andrada e Silva (1763–1838) was a geologist and
naturalist who shared Pombal’s outlook and looked to Napoleonic France
with its professional schools and government-supported research institu-
tions as the model to follow. The appreciation for the benefits of science and
rationality was pragmatic, and did not include a broader understanding
about the importance of autonomous universities and of a self-regulating
scientific community. In spite of these secular reforms, the Catholic Church
remained influential in Portugal and Brazil, always confronted by the small
elite educated in the military, engineering, medical, and law schools, who,
well into the twentieth century, got together in freemason lodges and
adopted the outlook of Comtian positivism as a new creed of modernization.
Positivism was taken more seriously in Brazil than practically anywhere
else. At the end of the nineteenth century, most of the teachers of the
Polytechnic School in Rio de Janeiro (Escola Politécnica) were positivists,
as were those of the School of Medicine. Comtian positivism was pervasive
in the Brazilian army, and was the outlook of a substantial part of the
political leadership from the states of Rio de Janeiro and Rio Grande do
Sul, who were active in the establishment of a republic in 1889. A positivist
church – Igreja Positivista – was established in the country, and its leaders
regularly corresponded with Emile Littré, in Paris, about questions of
positivistic orthodoxy. Positivism was instrumental in enhancing the impor-
tance of technology and rationality, but because it was dogmatic and did not
recognize the value of empirical research, it was an obstacle to the introduc-
tion of modern scientific and academic institutions. Positivism was repub-
lican and secular, but also authoritarian and oligarchic.8

FROM THE REPUBLIC TO THE SECOND WORLD WAR:

PUBLIC HEALTH AND AGRICULTURE

In 1888 slavery was formally abolished, and in 1889 a republican government

replaced the monarchy. To replace slave labor, the country opened up to
immigrants from Europe – mostly from Italy and Germany, but also from
Japan, some of whom remained in the plantations while others obtained
their own plots of land or moved to the cities. An incipient textile and shoe
industry emerged around the cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, staffed
largely by Italian immigrants. While the imperial scientific institutions
dwindled, new applied research and teaching institutions were established

7
Kenneth Maxwell, Pombal, Paradox of the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995).
8
João Cruz Costa, O Positivismo Na República: Notas Sobre a Historia do Positivismo no Brasil (São
Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1956); Robert G. Nachman, “Positivism, Modernization, and
the Middle Class in Brazil,” The Hispanic American Historical Review, 57 (1977), 1–23.

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 802 Marilia Coutinho and Simon Schwartzman
in São Paulo, the hub of the coffee economy, and other regions, most of
them led by European or European-educated scientists. They included the
Bacteriological Institute of São Paulo (Instituto Bacteriológico de São
Paulo), led by Adolpho Lutz, of Swiss origin (1855–1940); the Federal
Serotherapy Institute at Manguinhos in Rio de Janeiro (Instituto
Soroterápico Federal), headed by Oswaldo Cruz (1872–1917), who trained
at the Pasteur Institute; the Agronomic Institute of Campinas (Instituto
Agronômico de Campinas), led by the Austrian chemist Franz Wilhelm
Dafert (1863–1933); the Luiz de Queiroz Agricultural School in Piracicaba
(Escola Prática Luiz de Queiroz), organized by Belgian agronomist Leon
Alphonse Morimont; the Serum Therapy Institute in São Paulo (Instituto
Serumtherapico, which became the Instituto Butantan), led by Vital Brazil
(1865–1950); and new schools of medicine, engineering, pharmacy, and
veterinary medicine in São Paulo, Porto Alegre, and Rio de Janeiro.
All these new institutions were created with very practical goals, to
improve the quality of plants and deal with the tropical diseases that plagued
the country’s main cities and ports.9 The most successful were the bacteri-
ological and serum institutes erected according to Pasteur’s model to deal
with bubonic plague, yellow fever, smallpox, and other tropical diseases.
One of their best-known achievements was the identification by Carlos
Chagas (1879–1934) of the full cycle of the disease named after him
(Chagas Disease).10 During a limited period, the small “action and research”
communities formed inside these institutions were granted enough support
and autonomy to produce and deliver remarkable products to society and to
undertake significant scientific endeavors, with support, beginning in 1918,
from the Rockefeller Foundation.11 Important discoveries were made, and
their work is considered as the true beginnings of Brazilian science.12 They
found it difficult, however, to build upon these early achievements, stifled by
the narrow-minded requirements and regulations of the civil service and the
absence of a proper university environment from which to identify and
educate a new generation. There were exceptions, notably the work of Carlos
Chagas Filho, Carlos Chagas’ son (1910–2000), who created a laboratory of
biophysics research at the medical school in Rio de Janeiro and gained an
international reputation for his research on the properties of the Brazilian
electric eel (electrophorus electricus).

9
Donald B. Cooper, “Brazil’s Long Fight Against Epidemic Disease, 1849–1917, with Special
Emphasis on Yellow Fever,” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, 51 (1975), 672–96.
10
Marília Coutinho, “Ninety Years of Chagas Disease: A Success Story at the Periphery,” Social
Studies of Science, 29 (1999), 519–49; Rachel Lewinsohn, “Carlos Chagas and the Discovery of
Chagas’ Disease (American Trypanosomiasis),” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 74 (1981),
451–5.
11
Marcos Cueto, Missionaries of Science: The Rockefeller Foundation and Latin America (Bloomington,
Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1994).
12
Nancy Stepan, Beginnings of Brazilian Science: Oswaldo Cruz, Medical Research and Policy, 1890–1920
(New York: Science History Publications, 1976).

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 Brazil 803
Some scholarly and applied work in mathematics, physics, and astronomy
also developed around Rio de Janeiro’s Polytechnic School, an outgrowth of
the Military Academy established by the Portuguese in the early nineteenth
century; the Astronomic Observatory; the Geological and Mineralogical
Service; and the Experimental Station for Fuels and Minerals (Estação
Experimental de Combustíveis e Minérios), which became the National
Technological Institute. Mathematicians Otto de Alencar (1874–1912) and
Manuel Amoroso Costa (1885–1928), and astronomer Lélio Gama (1892–1981)
sought to bring to Brazil the new developments in mathematics and, later,
Einstein’s theories of relativity, which were rejected by the positivist dogma
that prevailed in the Polytechnic School.13 Bernhard Gross (1905–2002), born
in Germany and working at the National Institute of Technology (Instituto
Nacional de Tecnologia), was a pioneer in the modern understanding of
electrets, which was followed by the findings of Joaquim Costa Ribeiro
(1906–60) on the thermo-dielectric phenomenon named after him (the
Costa Ribeiro effect).

BEGINNINGS OF ACADEMIC RESEARCH

Beginning in the late 1890s, the state of São Paulo became the country’s richest
region, thanks to the revenues of coffee exports and the development of an
incipient manufacturing industry, and competed with the national government
in Rio de Janeiro for political leadership.14 In 1934 the state government decided
to create the country’s first university, meant to prepare a strong cultural and
intellectual elite. The University of São Paulo would eventually claim national
preeminence. Officials staffed the new Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences, and
Letters with international scholars who brought knowledge and skills from their
own intellectual traditions. They were expected to do their own research, train
students, and help to improve the old professional schools in the region, now
brought together in the university. They included, from Italy, mathematician
Luigi Fantappiè (1901–56) as well as the physicists Gleb Wataghin (1889–1996)
and Giuseppe Ochialini (1907–93), who worked in particle physics and formed
an outstanding group of Brazilian physicists, which also included Césare Lattes
(1924–2005), Oscar Sala (1910–2002), Mário Schenberg (1914–90), Roberto
Salmeron (b. 1922), Marcelo Damy de Souza Santos (1914–2009), and Jayme
Tiomno (1920–2011). From Germany came, among others, Henrich
Rheimboldt (1891–1955), of Jewish descent; Henrich Hauptmann (1905–60),
who organized the chemistry department; zoologist Ernst Marcus (1893–1968);

13
Clóvis Pereira da Silva, “Sobre a História da Matemática no Brasil Após o Período Colonial,” Revista
da SBHC, 16 (1996), 21–46.
14
Warren Dean, The Industrialization of São Paulo, 1880–1945 (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press,
1969).

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 804 Marilia Coutinho and Simon Schwartzman
and geologist Viktor Leinz (1904–83). A distinguished group of social scientists
came from France, including Roger Bastide (1898–1974), Fernand Paul Braudel
(1902–85), Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009), and François Perroux (1903–87).
Research in genetics also developed at the University of São Paulo, led by
German-born Friedrich Gustav Brieger (1900–85), who received support from
the Rockefeller Foundation for his cooperative work with leading US geneticist
and evolutionary biologist Theodosious Dobzhansky (1900–75).

POST-WAR DEVELOPMENTS: SCIENCE FOR POWER

AND ECONOMIC PLANNING

The Brazilian economy expanded and modernized after the Second World
War, urbanization increased, and new public and private universities started
to emerge. Brazil joined the Allies in the War, and several physicists from the
University of São Paulo participated in the war effort, developing sonars and
artillery equipment for the navy. The notion that science and technology
would bring a new era of modernization and wealth was widely shared, both
on the right by military leaders who wanted to bring to the country the
benefits of nuclear power and modern engineering, and on the left by
technical experts inspired by the examples of J. D. Bernal in the United
Kingdom and Jean Perrin in France, who believed modern developments
could only be achieved through Soviet-style central planning.15 In 1948 São
Paulo scientists organized the Brazilian Association for the Advancement of
Sciences (Sociedade Brasileira para o Progresso da Ciência, SBPC). Some of
the preeminent members, including physicist Mario Schenberg and para-
sitologist Samuel Pessoa (1898–1976), joined the Brazilian Communist
Party. In 1960 the two scientists helped to establish the São Paulo
Research Foundation (Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São
Paulo, FAPESP), a well-endowed state agency supporting scientific research.
Beginning in 1945, the Brazilian air force worked with MIT to establish
a school of aeronautics engineering in Brazil, the Aeronautics Technological
Institute (Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica, ITA), which gave birth to
Brazil’s space program, and the airplane construction company Embraer. In
1951 Admiral Alvaro Alberto da Mota e Silva (1889–1976) convinced the
government to establish a National Research Council and a National Center
for Physics Research (Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas, CBPF), to be
headed by Cesare Lattes, who had recently returned to the country after
working with Cecil Powell and G. Occhialini in the widely publicized
discovery of the Meson Pi. Although officials hoped this arrangement

15
J. D. Bernal, The Social Function of Science (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967); Mary Jo Nye,
“Science and Socialism: The Case of Jean Perrin in the Third Republic,” French Historical Studies, 9
(1975), 141–69.

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 Brazil 805
would bring the benefits of nuclear power to Brazil, the project did not
succeed, especially because of US opposition to nuclear proliferation.16
In 1964 the military took power in Brazil, starting a twenty-year period of
authoritarian rule. The coup followed a period of economic crisis and
political unrest, and justified itself as a defense against communism. The
new regime intervened in universities and trade unions, put the press under
censorship, and arrested and prosecuted opposition leaders and intellectuals,
including several scientists, who lost their jobs and in several cases were
forced to leave the country. In 1968 the government decided to reform the
country’s higher education sector by adopting several features of American
universities, including the credit system, academic departments, and grad-
uate programs, replacing the old European model of professional schools
and professorial chairs and requiring academic staff to have at least an MA
degree, preferably a doctorate. As the demand for higher education
expanded, the government allowed the private sector to grow, while access
to public institutions, which did not charge tuition, was limited by selective
entrance examinations.
A major shift in the science and technology sector took place in 1975,
when the government announced an ambitious three-year plan for scientific
and technological development.17 Since the beginning of the decade, the
economy had been growing at a rate of 10 percent or more, and the
government decided it was time to turn the country into a modern world
player, through heavy investments in infrastructure, a combination of strong
public and private companies, and heavy investments in science and tech-
nology, conceived as part of the broader, government-induced economic
development plan. The National Research Council changed its name to the
National Council of Scientific and Technological Development (Conselho
Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico) and was brought
under the umbrella of the Ministry of Planning. Support for science and
technology increased dramatically, with resources coming from the National
Development Bank and a new agency to finance large-scale projects, the
Funding Authority of Studies and Projects (Financiadora de Estudos
e Projetos, FINEP). The plan included the development of nuclear and
space technologies; subsidies for innovations in agribusiness and other
industries; investments in health, housing, and education technologies;
and the creation of a national fund for the expansion of graduate education
and independent research. Some of the new institutions established during

16
Emanuel Adler, “State Institutions, Ideology, and Autonomous Technological Development:
Computers and Nuclear Energy in Argentina and Brazil,” Latin American Research Review, 23
(1988), 59–90.
17
República Federativa do Brasil, “Decreto 77.355, II Plano Básico de Desenvolvimento Científico
e Tecnológico (PBDCT),” Diário Oficial Sessão 1, parte 1, no. 31 de março, Suplemento ao n. 65
(1976); Sérgio Salles Filho, “Política de Ciência e Tecnologia No II PBDCT (1976),” Revista
Brasileira de Inovação, 2 (2003), 179–211.

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 806 Marilia Coutinho and Simon Schwartzman
these years included the Gleb Wataghin Institute of Physics at the University
of Campinas (Instituto de Fisica “Gleb Wataghin”), with emphasis on
optical and solid state physics; the Coordination of Graduate Programs in
Engineering of the University of Rio de Janeiro (Coordenação dos Cursos de
Pós-graduação em Engenharia, COPPE), best known for its work on the
technologies of deep-sea oil exploration in partnership with the Brazilian oil
company Petrobras; and the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation
(Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária, EMBRAPA), under the
Ministry of Agriculture, which is credited with developing research on
plant genetics and land use that modernized Brazil’s agriculture.
The Brazilian economy stopped growing beginning in the late 1970s, due
to changes in the international economy with the oil shock, which was made
worse by the Mexican debt crisis in 1982 and the excessive spending of the
central government. The institutional framework for science and technology
created in those years, however, did not change. The number of students in
the new graduate programs increased from 22,000 to 35,000 between 1975
and 1983, the nuclear and space programs were not revised, and Brazil started
an ill-fated policy of developing a national microcomputer industry by
subsidizing local companies and limiting the access to equipment and soft-
ware from abroad. In 1985, already under a democratic regime, Congress
approved the creation of a Ministry of Science and Technology, which was
expected to put science at the core of the country’s national decision-
making, but in practice only increased the administrative overheads of the
existing institutions.

AUTONOMY AND ISOLATION OF THE SCIENCE

AND TECHNOLOGY SECTOR

The paradoxical consequence of the science and technology policies of the

1970s was the continuous growth of university-based graduate education
and research, despite the frustration of most of the attempts to link research
and development with the economy and the country’s social needs.
Graduate education was, and in 2016 continued to be, supervised by
a national agency within the Ministry of Education, named the
Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel
(Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior, CAPES),
which ranked the course programs in the universities according to their
academic achievement and provided their students with fellowships. The
National Research Council also provided fellowships for studies in the
country and abroad, and supported research projects through competitive
grants. In 2016, both agencies operated through peer review committees
staffed with researchers nominated by scientific societies and senior scholars.
The main regional agency for science and technology in the State of São

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 Brazil 807
Paulo, the São Paulo Research Foundation, which has been endowed with
a fixed percentage of the state’s revenues, was also administered by an
independent board and operated through peer review.
In the early twenty-first century, most research institutions were part
of the civil service, giving professors and researchers job stability, but
with rigid rules for salaries and promotion, and there was little opportu-
nity for job mobility. Researchers could add to their income to some
extent with resources from research projects, fellowships, and consulting,
but could not move easily between the public and the private sectors. The
peer review system of CAPES and the National Research Council
enforced the virtues of academic achievement, as measured by interna-
tional publications and other indications of scientific productivity, which
reduced the incentive for applied work. To bypass the rigidities of the
civil service, many public universities have established independent,
private-law foundations to handle research grants and external contracts,
and some research institutes have changed their legal status from statu-
tory to private law associations. The government has also tried to create
stronger links between science and technology and the productive sector,
by creating, in 1999, a new system of “sector funds” linking research with
specific sectors of the economy; adding the word “Innovation” to the
name and brief of the Ministry of Science and Technology in 2001; and
enacting two laws, the Innovation Law of 2004, to facilitate the links
between university and industry, and the so-called “Good Law” of 2005,
providing fiscal incentives to firms investing in research and innovation.18
These initiatives, however, were not enough to change the isolation of
the scientific establishment, since they did not change the legal frame-
work of the public universities nor the incentives of the science-support
agencies.
As the economy recovered in the mid-1990s, and particularly during
the decade of economic expansion led by China after 2004, resources
geared to science and technology increased systematically, along with the
number of graduate degrees and publications by Brazilian authors in the
international literature. The national expenditures on science and tech-
nology increased five times between 2000 and 2013, going from 1.04 to
1.24 percent of GDP, with most of the funds spent on salaries in public
universities and government institutions; the number of PhDs graduat-
ing each year went from 3813 to 16,729 between 1998 and 2014,19 with
most finding jobs in higher education institutions; and the number of
scientific articles in the international literature (“citable documents”)

18
Anne-Marie Maculan, “Towards a Knowledge-Based Economy in Brazil,” in Trends and Challenges
in Science and Higher Education: Building Capacity in Latin America, ed. Hugo Horta,
Manuel Heitor, and Jamil Salmi (Heidelberg: Springer, 2016), pp. 47–65.
19
Mestres e doutores 2015 – Estudos da demografia da base técnico-científica brasileira (Brasília: Centro de
Gestão e Estudos Estratégicos, 2016), p. 91.

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 808 Marilia Coutinho and Simon Schwartzman
increased from 8600 to 56,300 between 1996 and 2014.20 Several large-
scale projects were initiated with the support of the National Research
Council and particularly the São Paulo Research Foundation, including
the “Virtual Institute of Diversity” (FAPESP Research Program on
Biodiversity) and the Genome Project, the first group to sequence the
DNA of a phytopathogenic bacterium, Xylella fastidiosa, in partnership
with the Citrus Producers Association.21
During the second decade of the twenty-first century, Brazil had some
internationally renowned research institutions and programs, such as the
Institute for Applied and Pure Mathematics (Instituto Nacional de
Matemática Pura e Aplicada, IMPA) in Rio de Janeiro,22 but its main
university, the University of São Paulo, did not rank in the top hundred
in the international rankings; in general, the impact of the country’s
scientific publications has been limited when compared with countries
such as South Korea or Turkey. The number of patents produced by
Brazilian research institutions and companies has remained small, and,
in spite of legislation stimulating closer links between science and
industry and some outstanding exceptions, these links have tended to
remain weak.23
In 2014, the Brazilian economy entered a period of economic depres-
sion, sparked by the end of the commodities boom and the global financial
crisis of the 2010s, but made worse by the policies of state-driven capital-
ism, which were the hallmark of the military regime in the 1970s and were
continued by the populist governments in the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries. The attempts to create a strong and innovative
national capitalist economy through public subsidies and protection
against international competition failed, resulting in extremely high levels
of corruption that affected public and private corporations and the polit-
ical sector. The science and technology sector, based mostly in public
universities and government support institutes, lost a significant part of
its resources.
The crisis was expected to lead to a deep change in the Brazilian
economy, making it more open to international competition and mak-
ing the public sector smaller, more efficient, and concerned mostly with
issues related to social policy, infrastructure, and broad economic

20
Data from SCImago Journal and Country Rank, www.scimagojr.com/countrysearch.php?country=BR,
accessed January 10, 2016.
21
Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz and Hernan Chaimovich, “Brazil,” in UNESCO Science Report 2010:
The Current Status of Science Around the World (Paris: UNESCO Publishing, 2010), pp. 103–21,
on 112.
22
https://impa.br, accessed November 2, 2019.
23
Simon Schwartzman, “The Leading Latin American Universities and Their Contribution to
Sustainable Development in the Region,” in University and Development in Latin America:
Successful Experiences of Research Centers, ed. Simon Schwartzman (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers,
2008), pp. 4–20.

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 Brazil 809
regulation. Analysts at the time believed the science and technology
sector might have a chance to adjust, compensating for the reduction
of public subsidies by seeking stronger links with the productive sector,
becoming more flexible and stricter about the scientific quality and relevance
of its work.

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