This paper examines Brazil's export discoveries in aircraft, cell phones and swine meat. All cases confirm the importance of efficiency gains and sunk costs in the expansion of exports and lead to the following conclusions: both economic policy and comparative advantage played important roles in...

The last 20 years were a period of major political, economic, social, and institutional reform in Brazil. In the first half of the 1990s, reformers opened the economy to foreign trade and both direct and portfolio investment, sold off a number of large and traditional state-owned enterprises,...