[Brazil@Harvard] The Harvard-MIT Workshop on the Political Economy of Development in Brazil

*The Brazil Studies Program at Harvard's David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies presents* *Privatized Subsoil Rights in Brazil: 1880-1940* Presentation by Professor *Gail Triner*, Associate Professor of History, Rutgers University. Prof. Triner is author of Banking and Economic Development: Brazil, 1889-1930 (Palgrave Press, 2000). Her research interests include the economic history of Brazil, emphasizing finance, property rights and the environment, as well as the comparative history of Latin American banking. Professor Triner's presentation will assess the abrupt privatization of property rights to the subsoil in Brazil in 1891 by considering both the actions of miners and the outcome for the mining sector. Using new databases of indicators of mining activity (concessions and land transfers) and of mining law, Professor Triner finds that miners reacted to both privatization and re-nationalization (in 1934) in expansive manners. Neither change in the specification of rights led directly to meeting their goal of large-scale expansion, of iron ore exports and iron & steel manufacture, because of the complex interaction of other fundamental institutions. Notably, the indivisibility of real assets and the capital markets created insurmountable obstacles to private-sector mining development. Her conclusions suggest Olsen's theories of collective action as a framework for understanding the persistence of these barriers. Professor Triner by points to an important instance in which liberalized property rights were not sufficient to support self-sustaining growth, and emphasizes the need for institutional analysis to consider interaction, as well as the behavior of single, well-defined institutions. Date: *Friday, December 11 - TOMORROW* Time: 4:00-6:00pm Location: DRCLAS Resource Room S216 - CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge Street - HARVARD Contact: Marcio Siwi, msiwi(a)fas.harvard.edu This event is part of the Harvard-MIT Workshop on the Political Economy of Development in Brazil which is led by Professors Aldo Musacchio (Associate Professor and Marvin Bower Fellow, Harvard Business School) and Ben Ross Schneider (Professor of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology), the new Harvard-MIT Workshop seeks to promote an ongoing interdisciplinary academic exchange among professors, students, and practitioners in the Cambridge-Boston area with speakers who are experts on the political economy of development in Brazil.