Fernando Henrique Cardoso

Fernando Henrique Cardoso wrote the standard Marxist account of why poor countries stay poor, then stopped Brazilian inflation as finance minister and served eight years as president. He was a sociologist at the University of Sao Paulo, one of the authors of dependency theory - the argument, set out with Enzo Faletto in 1969, that Latin American underdevelopment was produced by the structure of its integration into the world economy rather than by a lack of it. The 1964 coup drove him into exile in Chile and France. He returned, entered politics as an opposition senator, and in 1993 became finance minister in a government left over from an impeachment. Inflation was running at around two thousand per cent a year. The Real Plan he assembled with a team of economists worked by introducing an accounting unit that tracked inflation daily, letting prices and wages reset against it, and only then converting it into a new currency; inflation fell to single figures within a year without a wage freeze or a deposit seizure, both of which earlier plans had tried. He was elected president on it in 1994 and again in 1998. He privatised telecommunications, mining and much of the banking system, passed the fiscal responsibility law, and began the conditional cash transfers that his successor Lula expanded into Bolsa Familia. Critics on the left noted that the professor of dependency governed by opening the economy, and he answered that he had never written a manual. He was arrested and forced out of his chair at the university before going into exile, and returned to teach again in the 1970s. The Real remains Brazil's currency. He handed power in 2003 to Lula, whom he had beaten twice, in the first transfer between elected presidents of opposing parties since 1961. He has kept publishing as a sociologist since leaving office.

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