A GREAT HIGH TECH FARM

Maurício Munhoz

What is modern in economics? Who is thinking about the new trends for this increasingly globalized world?

The Chinese are certainly ahead. I had the opportunity to spend a period of my life at the economics faculty of Beijing University, and I knew the mechanisms of the so-called One Belt and One Road, which is a great design for the formation of an incredible economic bloc.

The Chinese also saw, some time ago, the idea that currency is an instrument of account, of accounting itself. A concept that the brazilian economist Andre Lara Rezende described in a recent article.

But Americans are not sleeping. The MIT and HARVARD have developed an Atlas of Economic Complexity that accompanies, through a BIG DATA, the movement of more than 5 thousand products in 126 countries, and thereby distinguish the degree of dynamism economies of the countries.

You can view details of any country in any year. For example: in 1962, almost 49% of Brazilian exports were coffee. In 2017, five products accounted for almost 50% of exports: iron, soy, sugar, oil and meats.

In the Legislative Assembly of Mato Groso, Brazil, we have developed the ICSM, the Sustainable Growth Index of the Municipalities, which accompanies the economic, social and environmental indicators of the municipalities of Mato Grosso.

What Atlas and ICSM have in common is summarized in the text below, paraphrasing Paulo Gala:

Agriculture can simply import the machinery and chemicals it needs, and in that case Mato Grosso will remain a large high tech farm that employs few people, primarily to run the tractor, the planter, and the combine.

In addition, our primary exporting agriculture is very dependent on the commercial mechanism of the Chicago Stock Exchange, but the São Paulo Stock Exchange and Futures Exchange could be more integrated. The old custom of selling through Chicago is a dogma of the economy that deserves to be revised, as well as other ways and ways that the world productive sector has not yet learned to question.

Maurício Munhoz is a sociologist and winner of the Celso Furtado Prize for Economy 2017/18