RESUMO As economias do Brasil e do México entraram em colapso quase que simultaneamente no início dos anos 1980. Seus respectivos produtos por trabalhador permaneceram num estado de quase estagnação desde então. O texto desenvolve uma análise comparativa para tentar entender o que deu errado. Magnitudes macroeconômicas (acumulação de capital e progresso técnico) exibem mais similaridades do que diferenças. Essas aparecem de forma mais clara quando as mudanças de produtividade são analisadas de forma desagregada: por regiões, setores de atividade, comercialidade, tamanho de empresas e informalidade do trabalho. Nossos achados empíricos são consistentes com uma visão de que o fracasso econômico do Brasil esteve associado a protecionismo excessivo; o do México, a acentuada polarização doméstica.

ABSTRACT Brazil’s and Mexico’s economies collapsed almost simultaneously in the early 1980s. Their respective outputs per worker remained in a state of near stagnation since then. We develop a comparative analysis to try to understand what went wrong. Macroeconomic magnitudes (capital accumulation and technical progress) exhibit more similarities than differences. These appear more starkly when productivity changes are analyzed at disaggregated levels: by regions, sectors of activity, tradability, firm size, and labormarket informality. Our empirical findings are consistent with a view that Brazil’s economic failure is associated to excessive protectionism; Mexico’s to heightened domestic polarization.

The paper aims at explaining why Brazil's GDP growth plunged after 1980. Brazil's GDP grew at 7% yearly from 1940 to 1980 but at only 2.5% per year since then. Increases in the relative price of investment that reduced the purchasing power of savings, associated to declines in the productivity of capital, seem to have been the most important factors behind the observed loss of dynamism. The tentative conclusion is that inward-oriented economic policies since the 1970s and, perhaps, even as early as the 1950s, had negative long-run growth implications that were aggravated by populist policies in the early years of the post-1984 redemocratization.