Dependency and Crisis in Brazil and Argentina: a critique of market and state utopias

Abstract

Felipe Antunes de Oliveira has a very interesting and unique professional and intellectual background. He is a young Brazilian diplomat, university professor, and researcher at Queen Mary University in London. In 2023 and 2024, he returned to Brazil to work at the Ministry of Finance as part of the team for Brazil’s G20 presidency, where he coordinated the international taxation agenda and wrote speeches for Minister Fernando Haddad as well as numerous documents for Brazil’s presidency of the forum. Oliveira completed his doctoral dissertation at the University of Sussex, which was published as a book in 2024. The focus of the work is a comparison of the trajectories of development and international integration of Brazil and Argentina in the 1900s and 2000s. The original contribution was to identify the limits to overcoming dependence and to argue that both neoliberalism and neo-developmentalism are guided by the North’s “catch-up” myth. The argument is based on Leon Trotsky’s concept of unequal and combined development (UCD).