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In this paper we argue that efforts to apply Varieties of Capitalism to emerging economies can retaining a central role for institutions as constraining, it is important to incorporate into the analysis the nature and role of social blocs and the development of growth regimes. The paper develops a framework that systematically explores the links and interactions between institutions, the politics of social blocs and the viability of growth regimes as a way of understanding the trajectory of varieties of capitalism. We illustrate the value of this framework by applying it to developments in Brazil over the last three decades. In our concluding section, we describe how the application of the framework can be broadened not just to other emerging economies but also to the challenges currently being faced by advanced capitalist democracies. We identify a series of research questions developing and applying insights from this framework. A theoretically renewed comparative capitalisms approach to emerging economies is therefore potentially going to provide a payoff to developing a global perspective on forms of capitalism and their trajectories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the effects of subordinate financial integration on workers in peripheral countries. The objective is to link the financial, productive and social reproduction spheres, taking into account the centre-periphery dynamic in the global process of capital valorisation. In this sense, the main contribution is the proposition of an analytical framework on the subject, based on Marxist and post-Keynesian inspired literature. Considering the asymmetric international relations within the hierarchical monetary system, the dynamics of capital cycles and the external imbalances of peripheral economies, five transmission channels are proposed concerning: (i) the burden of wealth transfer, (ii) the rise in household indebtedness, (iii) the effects of exchange rate volatility on real wages, (iv) the increased pressure for fiscal discipline which contributes to labour and social security reforms, and (v) the regressive specialisation of the productive structure and its impacts on employment. The secondary contribution refers to the comparative analysis of the cases of subordinate financialisation of Brazil and Colombia. The results of this analysis reveal the relevance of the proposed channels in terms of the dynamics of workers' social reproduction in a contemporary context, particularly with regard to wages, employment, household indebtedness and labour and social security rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sexual and reproductive health needs and rights are one of the bleakest examples of (racialised) gender health inequalities in Brazil. This is so despite legal and constitutional specificity recognising the right to health as right of citizenship. In this paper we argue that a 'performance gap' is revealed in contradictions between what the right to health as a normative framework encourages states to do, and institutional arrangements and power relations that underpin everyday gendered inequalities in health delivery. The contribution of this article is two-fold. First, it contributes to feminist political economy accounts of the neglect of sexual and reproductive rights by adding a perspective of human dignity as an approach to gender inequalities. Second, it explores ways in which health inequalities manifest in everyday practices, and how divergent expectations of what the right to health means for professionals and for disadvantaged black women limit the capacity of healthcare to make a difference to their well-being. The article also underlines the importance of complementing legal accountability in health with mechanisms that account for prerogatives of gender justice, equality and dignity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the recent changes in financial practices and relations in emerging capitalist economies (ECEs) using the example of Brazil. It argues that in ECEs these financial transformations, akin to the financialisation phenomena observed in Core Capitalist Economies (CCEs), are fundamentally shaped by their subordinated integration into a financialised and structured world economy. To analyse this subordinated financialisation, the paper draws on the framework of international currency hierarchies. It shows by means of two specific processes how the existence of a hierarchic international monetary system has changed the financial behaviour of domestic economic agents, and with it the structure of the financial system. The first process highlights the phenomenon of reserve accumulation and the changing behaviour of domestic banks. The second points to ECEs' sustained external vulnerability and its impact on the operations of Brazilian nonfinancial corporations. The paper also shows that not only were these financial transformations shaped by ECEs' subordinated financial integration, but also that it was these financialisation tendencies themselves which contributed to cementing existing hierarchies and further deepened existing asymmetries between ECEs and CCEs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes to critically situate how social developmentalism reshaped social policy in Brazil in the 2000s, to stimulate access to credit and to financial markets, thereby fostering a transition towards a mass-consumption society. This structural move is radically distinct from the very framework which inspired the tenets of early Latin American structuralist thought in the post-war period. Whereas seminal structuralism neglected the role of social policy, Brazilian social developmentalism reframed it to broaden access to consumer credit and other financial services, such as insurances. In this new financialised framework, social policy has been used to underwrite a financial inclusion model that overturned classic tenets of social policy. As a result, not only household debt has abruptly escalated, but also social insurance and welfare benefits have been partially absorbed as financial rents, deepening economic insecurity and social vulnerability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brazil has emerged as an agro-export powerhouse: from being a net-agricultural importer and food aid recipient as recently as the 1960s and 1970s, it has now become the world’s third largest agricultural exporter, after the US and EU. What is more, Brazil’s new role as a major agricultural trader has provided an important foundation for its enhanced status and influence in global economic governance, as an emerging power and one of the ‘BRICS’. This paper analyses how such a remarkable transformation was brought about. I argue that Brazil’s emergence as an agricultural powerhouse was the result not of its natural factor endowments, but extensive intervention on the part of the Brazilian state that had the effect of constructing a new comparative advantage. This transformation was propelled by state-driven innovation and related policies that opened up massive new areas of the country to agriculture, enabled it to shift to producing goods in direct competition with the world’s dominant agricultural exporters, and generated significant gains in productivity and competitiveness. The irony is that the intention of these policies, initiated in the 1970s, was to foster industrial development in Brazil as part of its import-substitution industrialisation programme, yet they wound up having precisely the opposite effect – transforming Brazil into one of the world’s dominant agricultural powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existing international economic order has been heavily shaped by US power and the US has been a key driver of globalisation and neoliberal economic restructuring, prompting speculation about whether the rise of new developing country powers could rupture the current trajectory of neoliberal globalisation. This paper analyses the case of Brazil at the World Trade Organization (WTO), a core institution in global economic governance. In the last decade, Brazil successfully waged two landmark trade disputes against the US and EU and created a coalition of developing countries – the G20 – which brought an end to the dominance of the US and EU at the WTO and made their trade policies a central target of the Doha Round. Brazil's activism has been widely hailed as a major victory for developing countries. However, I argue that rather than challenging the neoliberal agenda of the WTO, Brazil has emerged as one of the most vocal advocates of free market globalisation and the push to expand and liberalise global markets. I show that Brazil's stance has been driven by the rise of its export-oriented agribusiness sector. This case demonstrates that business actors from the Global South are becoming significant new protagonists in global economic governance; they are taking the tools created by the states and corporations of the Global North – in this case, the WTO and its neoliberal discourse – and turning them against their originators. At the same time, their interests are being wrapped in and advanced through a discourse of development and social justice and a strategic mobilisation of the politics of the North-South divide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]