Internal Barriers for the Brazilian Economy to Achieve External Competitiveness

The Brazilian economy has been stagnant for almost 50 years because it has created an environment refractory to efficiency, productivity, competitiveness, and interaction with the foreign market. This option deteriorated the education system, bureaucratized the tax system, biased the regulatory framework, hindered foreign professors–researchers to access public universities, and partnerships between these universities and the market. Such directions led to a low growth trajectory. The objective of this chapter was to present and interpret the statistics of the performance of the Brazilian economy compared to those of the BRICS countries, Latin America, and Asia. We used the principle of income convergence of the endogenous growth theory as an analytical parameter to indicate that the technological gap and the lack of competitiveness of the Brazilian economy are results of its choices that institutionalized the misallocation of resources, which blocked the advance of technical progress and productivity in its market.