Munich Personal RePEc Archive China and Brazil Productive Structure and Economic Growth Compared: 1980’s to 2000’s Guilhoto, Joaquim José Martins and Polenske, Karen Rosel and Liu, Hongtao University of Sao Paulo 2010 Online at https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/30123/ MPRA Paper No. 30123, posted 07 Apr 2011 18:44 UTC China and Brazil Productive Structure and Economic Growth Compared: 1980’s to 2000’s Hongtao Liu School of Management, Xian Jiaotong University, P. R. China Visiting PhD student, Department of Urban Studies and Planning - MIT E-mail:
[email protected] Karen Rosel Polenske Department of Urban Studies and Planning - Massachusetts Institute of Technology E-mail:
[email protected] Joaquim José Martins Guilhoto Department of Economics, FEA - University of São Paulo REAL, University of Illinois; Visiting Professor, MIT E-mail:
[email protected] FIRST DRAFT Paper Presented at 57th Annual North American Meetings of the Regional Science Association International Denver, USA - November 10th - 13th, 2010 Abstract China and Brazil are two countries with continental dimensions, with differences in availability of natural resources, population sizes, and which have adopted different strategies of economic growth in the past. China has been following consistently a strategy of Export Led Growth (ELG), while Brazil, until the mid 1990s had a strategy based on Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) with a relatively closed economy to the external market; however, recently Brazil has been switching to a more open economy, based on primary goods exports. In the mid 1980s the Gross National Income measured in US$ using purchasing power parity rates (GNI- PPP) of China and Brazil were at approximately the same level, but by the mid 2000s the GNI- PPP of China was around 4 times greater than Brazil’s.