Globalization, economic adjustment, and atate reform

an Evaluation of recent literature

Abstract

The article evaluates the current decade’s theoretical production in Brazil and in the international academic world with regards to State reform, an issue that moved to the top of the agenda in the early 1990s. With no pretense of offering an exhaustive examination of all available bibliography, the article instead undertakes a systematization focused around a specific question: the critical analysis of the reductionist and dichotomous approaches that have characterized a large part of production in this area. What is detected is a crisis in paradigms and an inability to deal analytically with the complexity of the issues involved. Academic reflection must now pursue new theoretical formulations able to account for the relations between State, market, and politics within the domestic sphere, while in the international arena it is necessary to account for relations between nation-states and the international system, characterized by capitalist globalization and democratic consolidation during the present phase.