Minerals offer an unusually clear venue for understanding the history and application of economic ideas in Brazil. This chapter demonstrates the path dependency of economic ideas and the importance of ideology for conditioning economic governance within Brazil by focusing on the long course of often competing debates about import-substituting industrialization, export promotion and foreign economic involvement. The strong hold of structuralist theories during the middle of the twentieth century; the role of foreign individuals, capital and technology; the divide between public and private sectors in the economic sphere and the emergence of the state as an industrial entrepreneur have been prevailing themes in Brazilian debates about governance and ideology. As we have seen in Chapters 3 to 5, they have also been the themes that dominated the institutional conflicts in developing industrialized iron ore capacity for three centuries.

The emergence of structuralism and of economic nationalism examined in this chapter makes three important points. First, the debates and developmental efforts of the second half of the twentieth century were not new; they have roots in ideologies articulated as early as the colonial era. Secondly, competing (and evolving) definitions of property were central to the formulation of the economic role of the Brazilian state in the twentieth century. Thirdly, the abstract ideas of economic ideologies were important factors that shaped the manner in which industrialized mining emerged within Brazil.