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This paper looks in detail at the sharp slowdown in the Brazilian economy for the years 2011-2014. We argue that the slowdown is overwhelmingly the result of a sharp decline in domestic demand, rather than a fall in exports and even less any change in external financial conditions. The sharp fall in domestic demand, in turn, is shown to be a result of deliberate policy decisions made by the government and was not necessary, i.e., it was not made in response to some external constraint such as a balance-of-payments problem.

Ricardo and Marx saw technological change as a possible cause of long-period unemployment. Neoclassical and Schumpeterian economists regard technological unem ployment as a transitory phenomenon. This paper argues that the capital critique (i) demolishes the neoclassical claim that market mechanisms will restore full employment whenever workers are displaced by technical change, and (ii) rehabilitates the old Ricardian argument that automatic compensation factors are generally absent. The neo-Schumpeterian notion of autonomous investment is also rejected, in favour of the view that, in the long period, all investment is induced. By extending Keynes's theory of effective demand to the long period through a model based on the supermultiplier, this paper suggests that the ultimate engines of growth are located in the autonomous components of effective demand--exports, government spending and autonomous con sumption. Technical change plays a role in the accumulation process through its effects on consumption patterns and the material input requirements. However, the impact of technical change is now seen to depend upon circumstances such as income distribution, the availability of bank liquidity and exchange rate policy.

This paper aims to show that the Sraffian supermultiplier model provides an alternative closure for the heterodox analysis of economic growth. The new closure follows from the assumption of the existence of autonomous non-capacity-creating expenditures, which implies that the ratio of the average to the marginal propensity to save is an endogenous variable whose determination allows the marginal propensity to invest to determine the saving ratio without the need for changes in income distribution. Provided it is also assumed that capitalist competition leads to gradual changes in the marginal propensity to invest in order to adjust productive capacity to demand, the new closure (in contrast to the Cambridge and neo-Kaleckian closures) allows us to reconcile demand-led growth, exogenous distribution, and a tendency towards normal capacity utilization.