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We present a Kaldor-Thirlwall theoretical and empirical framework on the basic driving forces of the behaviour of productivity and economic development in the long-run. From the Kaldorian view, we anchor on the hypothesis that, by operating under static and dynamic economies of scale, the main sources of the growth of productivity of the economy as a whole come from the manufacturing sector. Yet, according to the so-called Thirlwall's Law, for a country to prevent from facing balance of payments contraints to growth in the long run and successfully catch up with the levels of income per capita and well-being of developed countries, it must maintain an income elasticity of demand for exports above the income elasticity of demand for imports. Based on these main hypotheses and some stylised facts observed and pioneered by Kaldor, we show some empirical evidence based on both descriptive statistics and econometric regressions for Brazil between 1970 and 2010. There are at least four clear indicators to suggest that Brazil has entered into a process of early de-industrialisation: i) the sharp drop in participation of the Brazilian manufacturing industry in total value added in the last decades; ii) its declining average yearly growth rate of labour productivity since the end of the 1990s; iii), the dramatic augmentation of the technological gap in all subsectors of the manufacturing industry, classified by technological intensity, since the end of the 1990s and; iv) the significant trade deficits in the manufacturing subsector of more technological intensity between 2006 and 2008. In addition, since our econometric estimates also show that there was a dramatic increase in the income elasticity of demand for imports (from 1.97 to 3.36) and a decrease in the income elasticity for exports between 1999 and 2010, compared with the 1980-1998 period (from 1.36 to 1.33), we can conclude that Brazil has already embarked on a trajectory of falling-behind and has been facing balance of payments constraints to growth in the long run. However, since our econometric estimation of the Kaldor-Verdoorn coefficient revealed that the Brazilian manufacturing industry operates under dynamic economies of scale, this result means that the Brazilian manufacturing industry has, in principle, potential to sustain economic growth in the long run. All these results have important economic policy implications. The most important is that there is still time to revert both the early de-industrialisation and falling behind path in favour of a catching up trajectory in the Brazilian economy, since there is a fine coordination between the long-term policies (industrial and technological policies, infrastructure and education policies, among others) and the short-term macroeconomic policies (monetary, fiscal and, especially, exchange rate policies) oriented to boost the technological content of both Brazilian manufacturing goods and exports.

This article analyzes the relationship between economic growth, income distribution and real exchange rate within the neo-Kaleckian literature, through the construction of a nonlinear macrodynamic model for an open economy in which investment in fixed capital is assumed to be a quadratic function of the real exchange rate. The model demonstrates that the prevailing regime of accumulation in a given economy depends on the type of currency misalignment, so if the real exchange rate is overvalued, then the regime of accumulation will be profit-led, but if the exchange rate is undervalued, then the accumulation regime is wage-led. Subsequently, the adherence of the theoretical model to data is tested for Brazil in the period 1994/Q3-2008/Q4. The econometric results are consistent with the theoretical non-linear specification of the investment function used in the model, so that we can define the existence of a real exchange rate that maximizes the rate of capital accumulation for the Brazilian economy. From the estimate of this optimal rate we show that the real exchange rate is overvalued in 1994/Q3- 2001/Q1 and 2005/Q4-2008/Q4 and undervalued in the period 2001/Q2-2005/Q3. As a direct corollary of this result, it follows that the prevailing regime of accumulation in the Brazilian economy after the last quarter of 2005 is profit-led