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 - TODAY
Time: 4:00-6:00pm
Location: DRCLAS Resource Room S216 - CGIS South Building, 1730
Cambridge Street - HARVARD
Contact: Marcio Siwi, msiwi@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.
--
Marcio Siwi
Fellow / Program Officer
Brazil Studies Program
Harvard University
David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies
1730 Cambridge St.
Cambridge, MA 02138
tel (617) 495-5435
http://drclas.harvard.edu/brazil