Celso Furtado - Biography

Biography

Born in Pombal, a city set in the semi-arid region of the state of Paraíba, Celso Furtado moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1939, to study Law, and graduated from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) in 1944. That same year, he was conscripted to the Brazilian Expeditionary Force to fight in Italy, during World War II, alongside the Allies. Seeing countries destroyed in post-war Europe had a profound impact on him, leading to the decision that he would study Economics: he enrolled in a doctorate program at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), in 1946, and presented a thesis on the economy of Brazil during the colonial period.

In 1949, he moved to Santiago, Chile, where he joined the team of the newly-created United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (best known by its Latin American acronym, CEPAL), which was then headed by Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch. While working at CEPAL, Furtado and Prebisch were decisive for the formulation of socioeconomic policies for the development of Latin America which emphasized on industrialization.

Upon his return to Brazil in 1959, he published his most famous book – The Economic Growth of Brazil: A Survey from Colonial to Modern Times (in Portuguese: Formação Econômica do Brasil) – and was appointed the director of the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDE) in charge of issues concerning states of the northeastern region, which are poor and face chronic droughts and desertification. During this period, he developed a plan which resulted in the creation of the Superintendency for the Development of the Northeast (Sudene), a governmental agency that worked to stimulate economic growth in that region, and was appointed by Brazilian president Juscelino Kubitschek (1956–1961) the agency's first director. During the government of president João Goulart (1961–1964), Furtado became Minister of Planning and was responsible for Brazil's Triennial Plan of development.

Furtado was also one of the founders of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), an intergovernmental body created in 1964, whose work has since centered around issues related to development and the asymmetries of international trade.

With the Brazilian military coup d'état, in 1964, he was forced into exile and worked as professor at Yale University, in the United States, and later at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), in France. After the Law of Amnesty, in 1979, he returned to Brazil and was appointed Ambassador of Brazil at the EEC, in Brussels (1985–1986) and Minister of Culture in the government of president José Sarney (1985–1990).

In 2004, the year of his death, Celso Furtado was nominated to the Nobel Prize of Economics (Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences).