Lula’s boom rested on commodity exports and welfare, not industrial upgrading

Evidence

For a decade, a construction boom in China had meant robust demand for Latin American commodities. With this money coming in, Lula expanded a set of modest but efficient social programs that distributed more gains to the working class. The most famous was Bolsa Familia, a welfare program for poor families that kept their kids vaccinated and in schools. … Yet this was not the realization of the socialist revolution. It was not even the industrial “upgrading” policy that had guided so many development projects in the twentieth century. It was built on the classic Third World practice of extracting the land’s raw materials and shipping them off to other countries. But here, it seemed to be working. Inequality was falling, and things were getting better. As his second term came to an end, Lula enjoyed a ludicrously high approval rating—83 percent of Brazilians supported the president. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 170

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the extractive economy critique found in A Mission to Civilize and later dependency-theory works on Latin America; also foreshadows the fragility when Chinese demand dried up.
• SEED: Angle: the political fragility of commodity-export welfare states — what happened when the boom ended makes a strong piece about Lula’s successors.