Economic knowledge on the Brazilian debate on poverty - Actors, institutions, and ideas

Poverty in Brazil has been mainly defined and publically debated by way of statistical or econometric calculations and diagnoses about the efficient use of resources focused on its resolution. Starting from the hypothesis that the predominance of these terms reflects a broader process of change that places the economic practice and knowledge as favored in the debate of the public issues, the presentation proposes to identify this movement from the path of one of its participants, a government institution called Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica e Aplicada (Applied Economics Research Institute), IPEA.

The scenario of the liberalization movement, set in motion in the 1970s and 1980s has been recovered by the research since we believe it is where the movement which causes the change that is the subject of this investigation comes from: the prominence of economic knowledge over other areas of social life that also obey logic that is not only economic; among them the debates on poverty. It is when terms of efficiency, responsibility and expertise begin to provide the parameters of recognition and legitimacy attributed to the economic experts.

The object of the presentation is to outline the way by which econometric terms and the matter of adequate resource management gained prominence in debates about poverty, in detriment to issues such as social justice and rights in Brazil. The IPEA was defined as an empirical object as it is a state institution for the production of knowledge and whose goal is to foster the development, implementation and execution of public policies. Thus, its nature as well as the relationships that it maintains (government, international institutions and academia), makes it the object of choice for the observation of how policy changes also rely on the production of legitimate perspectives and ideas through technical knowledge, most often taken for granted.