A macroeconomic systemic model for the Brazilian economy

摘要

It was shown that a simple systemic model is able to "imitate" the behavior of a complex economy, a result that has been surprising for an increasing number of economists that use simulation techniques to study economic dynamics . But the fact of being capable to do this should not be considered as an evidence of its validation in any absolute sense. More important than that, however, is to verify if it captures important characteristics of less developed economies as the Brazilian one. The main ones are:1) the short term growth rate is influenced in an important way by the effective demand; in the medium term, however, the growth is restricted by real factors such as the capital stock and the capacity to import;2) attempts of growing above the rate allowed by those restrictions accelerate the inflation rate or provoke unbalance in the balance of payments;3) in both cases, the government is forced, earlier or later, to adopt restrictive monetary policies to reduce the final demand growth rate, reducing the domestic absorption of resources4) an important leverage point to reach a sustainable growth path is to create conditions for a consistent increase of the exports. The reason is that, differently of the growth induced by public expenses, the increase of exports generates international currency that can be used to finance the indispensable imports to sustain the growth process in the long period. That is, the growth of the exports allows increasing the employment level internally without pressing the inflation rate (because the imports can grow along the process) and without generating external unbalance;5) the growth of exports in the medium term, however, requires significant investments in competitiveness acquisition, without which the country will be limited to sell products in international markets already saturated such as the one of commodities and, therefore, with limited growth potential.The model presented, although it still needs to be largely improved, seems to be consistent with those general characteristics of the Brazilian economy and it seems to be capable, above all, of throwing some light in the current discussion, in large part inconclusive, on how to rediscover the road of economic growth, which for a long time seemed to be the natural state of our economy but was lost since the decade of 1980.