The Sectoral Politics of Industrial Policy Making in Brazil: A Polanyian Interpretation

Abstract

This article considers why Brazilian industrial policies have varied across sectors since the mid‐1990s. It relies on a Polanyian‐inspired framework to propose that the strength of counter‐movements against corporate welfare shapes the sector‐specific capacity of policy makers to exert state discipline over business interests and diverges from neoliberal scripts of industrial policy making. The authors use prototypical case studies on the automotive, animal protein and pharmaceutical sectors to support their argument. In the automotive industry, the continuous pressure from powerful and cohesive labour unions led to the emergence of a neo‐corporatist sectoral regime that was characterized by a tripartite policy design and encompassed conditionalities. In the case of animal protein, the lack of bottom‐up pressure culminated in a disembedded neoliberal sectoral regime, in which business owners received almost unconditional benefits, turning industrial policies into corporate welfare. Finally, in the pharmaceutical industry, the combination of diffuse societal demands and unions with intermediate relevance led to an embedded neoliberal sectoral regime that combined selective conditionalities with some space for non‐business participation in policy design.