Capitalism in Brazil and COVID-19: crisis, repercussions and responses to the pandemic

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic had different impacts across the globe, according to both country structure and conjunctural responses from local governments. This article aims to characterize the main traits of capitalism in Brazil, with a focus on its evolution over the last 20 years and the way these characteristics shaped both the impacts of the pandemic and the responses to the so-called "Corona-crisis". The hypothesis is that the socioeconomic impacts of any world crisis tend to be higher in peripheral countries, but the government reactions to such crises are important in determining the socioeconomic dynamics that evolve. The analysis is attentive to the interactions between aspects which are inherent to the capitalist system, aspects related to the Brazilian colonial history and the resulting insertion of Brazil in the global economy, and aspects related to the Brazilian current context - in particular the socioeconomic and political crises since 2014, the coup d'état against President Dilma Rousseff in 2016 and the outbreak of the pandemic in a country governed from 2018 to 2022 by a far-right government. The main conclusions are that the pandemic provoked no major changes, but rather accelerated ongoing movements and deepened some old traits of the Brazilian economy, especially its vulnerability, its structural heterogeneities, the precariousness of the labor market and social inequalities.