Project description
The birth and growth of Brazil
The EU-funded REGROWTH project will review and reconstruct Brazil's population and economic development between the 17th century and 1920 to boost understanding of the country which was a colony of Portugal for over 300 years. Specifically, it will assess Brazil's population, prices, wages, welfare ratios and GDP during this period. The findings are expected to shed light on the country's historical development, including the great divergence and the colonial origins debates. The project will test competing hypotheses about why nations grow and decline. REGROWTH will provide the first data series of four centuries of Brazilian economic growth.
Objective
This project reconstructs series for Brazil’s population, prices, wages, welfare ratios, gross domestic product (GDP), and GDP per capita from the seventeenth century to 1920. This is the first reconstruction of consistent, annual population and economic series for this period and will change the understanding that we have today of Brazil’s historical economic growth. This project will be conducted at the Institute of Social Sciences (ICS) of the University of Lisbon, under the supervision of Nuno Palma, with Jaime Reis as a member of the board. Long-run GDP per capita series are central to economic growth research, to test competing hypotheses about why nations grow and decline, and for main debates in comparative historical development, such as the great divergence and the colonial origins debates. Until today, however, Brazil has been excluded from these areas of research. This project intends to bridge this gap using known figures in the literature, recently digitized archival sources, and novel archival research in the Overseas Historical Archive and the Torre do Tombo National Archive in Portugal. In addition to providing the first series of four centuries of Brazilian economic growth, it will contribute to a number of debates in the specialized and interdisciplinary literatures and generate open-access databases with the reconstructed time series.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. This project's classification has been validated by the project's team.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. This project's classification has been validated by the project's team.
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
1600 189 Lisboa
Portugal