Furtado, Celso

Born 1920 in Pombal, Brazil. Brazilian economist.

In the 1960’s, Furtado was Brazil’s minister of planning; he helped formulate economic development plans for Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela. After the Brazilian military coup of 1964, Furtado emigrated. He has been a professor at Yale University (1964) and the University of Paris.

Furtado takes a liberal bourgeois position in his criticism of the business practices of foreign capital and especially of multinational corporations in Latin America. He points out the fallacy of the theory of stages of economic growth and holds that the economic backwardness of the developing countries is related to the establishment of the world capitalist economy. Furtado is an advocate of increased government intervention in the economic system. He is aware of the class contradictions based on private capitalist property relations; even though he reduces the class struggle primarily to its economic aspects, he also recognizes its decisive importance for socioeconomic development.