A Dependência estrutural do Brasil: como a cooperação internacional com o Japão suscita uma dependência econômica brasileira?

Abstract

This research analyzes the international economic relations between Brazil and Japan, especially since the 1950s, in order to understand how both countries established economic ties, presenting aspects that fostered technical cooperation, as well as exposing treaties and agreements that have helped to bring about such a relationship. Thus, from the logic of the World-System, this analysis seeks to verify the Brazil-Japan cooperation as an international strategy of Brazilian development, however, that promotes an economic dependence of Brazil towards Japan. Judging by Dependency Theory, which analyzes such systemic logic as a factor that maintains the international status quo, whose current capitalist order encourages the development of certain countries to the detriment of others. This research, therefore, analyzes the import and export data established between both countries, a factor that helps to understand how such dependence occurs in an excluding global economic order. This fact, although the trade balance is favorable to Brazil, aiming at the economicist bias, when analyzing the characteristics of this economic relation, Brazilian nation tends to remain peripheral, due to the characteristic of exporter of raw material. Therefore, although Japan invests in Brazil, as well as in the development of the Brazilian Cerrados through the Japanese-Brazilian Cooperation Program for the Development of the Cerrados (PRODECER), according to dependence theory, this relation contributes to the peripheral position of Brazil in the international system, manifesting itself in the export of Brazilian commodities, while Japan exports products with high added value. In turn, the International Division of Labor (IDL) and the deterioration of the terms of trade, in a systemic capitalist logic, aid in the understanding of the proposed argument, in which Brazil, relative to Japan, remains subordinate due to the unequal hierarchical structure and excluding from capitalism.