Brazilian Multinational Corporations in Africa: The Brazilian Government as ‘pushmi-pullyu’?

• In Event: Brazil and China in Africa: South-South Engagement in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

A major aspect of the Lula administration’s engagement with Africa was the rapid expansion of Brazilian corporate presence on the continent. To date the literature exploring the move by Brazilian firms into the African market is driven more by (erroneous) suppositions of large volumes of export financing from the BNDES than by concrete research into the underlying dynamics of business-government relations and how this impacted corporate decision-making in Brazil. Taking the mythical ‘pushmi-pullyu’ creature from the Dr Doolittle children’s books as a metaphorical starting point this paper investigates the extent to which Lula’s move to Africa was driven by a strong ‘push’ from the corporate sector versus propositions in the literature that it was the Brazilian government that ‘pulled’ national firms across the Atlantic. In theoretical terms the question is to what extent the embedded model of internationalized Brazilian state capitalism creating the ‘pushmipullyu’ dynamic differs from the sort of example seen from China, with the purported existence of a difference being a key argument from Brazilian policy makers that their country’s firms makes a better long-term partners for African markets. The paper draws on interviews with corporate and government executives in Angola, Brazil, Mozambique and Washington as well as extensive media and corporate report surveys.

Author

• Sean W Burges, Australian National University