In the episode, Ana Frazão talks with Nuno Palma, Professor of Economics at the University of Manchester about the article Economic Growth in Brazil – How a nation was born: Brazilian economic growth: 1574-1920, which the interviewee wrote in co-authorship with Guilherme Lambais, University of Lisbon. The article depicts a study on Brazil's GDP per capita from the colonial period to the republic, showing that, even though Brazil is always a poor country, there was a brief period at the beginning of colonization, in which Brazilians had an average income comparable to that of European countries. Then, in the middle of the 17th century, the country impoverished and only in the mid-19th century did GDP grow again. In the study, the authors conclude that the engine of this history is slavery, which is responsible for the trap of low wages, low technology and low development, as it impoverished the enslaved, impoverished the free worker and discouraged the adoption of more efficient productive processes. That is why the abolition of slavery, far from being just a humanitarian issue, was also economically efficient. Professor Nuno still makes parallels between his studies and those of Celso Furtado and Nathaniel Leff and makes some speculations about the extent to which the extractive institutions (in the terminology of Acemoglu and Robinson) arising from slavery do not persist to this day. At the end of the conversation, other fronts of studies and analyses are explored to understand the formation of economic institutions in Brazil.
