Maria da Conceição Tavares passed away last Sunday. She was among the key thinkers of the Latin American Structuralist School, often associated with the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA). In her case, Anibal Pinto, who was her teacher in a ECLA course in the early 1960s, and Celso Furtado, who was never formally her teacher, were her major influences. She was instrumental in introducing Kalecki in Brazilian academic circles, and in her debate with Furtado on the possibilities of growth in the late 1960s (Furtado defended a stagnationist thesis) she started to move in the direction of demand-led growth theories. She also noted in the mid-1980s that the diplomacy of the dollar (and the end of Bretton Woods) essentially implied that American Hegemony was stronger than ever. She was associated to the failed stabilization plans of the 1980s (in particular the Cruzado Plan), and was critical of the neoliberal policies of her friend Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and her co-author José Serra. She was a member of congress (I should say I did work for her campaign back in 1994), and she was close to the Workers' Party administrations. Her contributions both to academia and to Brazilian politics were without comparison, and she will be missed.
For those that read in Spanish, here a paper I wrote a few years ago on her contributions to heterodox economics. It was published in this book edited by Juan Odisio and Marcelo Rougier on several key Latin American thinkers.
An obit written with Esteban Pérez is available here.
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