Drawing from materials in untapped archives throughout Brazil, Mexico, Europe and the United States, panelists will present new insights on how economic policymakers find the strength to challenge business or how they fail to do so; how governments convince capital to fund their activities; how politicians respond to pressures for austerity; how officials tax and don’t tax to promote development; how relations with foreign financial institutions may both constrain and shore up government action; how taxation can have disparate and unexpected effects across different social groups.

Gisselle Perez-Leon explores how local officials raised money to finance crucial hydraulic infrastructure in the absence of consistent federal oversight at the turn of the century in the US-Mexico borderlands. Jay Pan analyzes the emergence of austerity as a fiscal, monetary, and industrial practice in 1950s Mexico. By redistributing the costs of austerity onto the popular sectors, austerity transformed the postrevolutionary state itself into the principal object of class conflict. Camilo Ruiz Tassinari explores Mexico’s power industry to argue that a combination of heterodox paper-printing, semi-forced contributions from Mexican bankers, and generous if confidential tax breaks allowed the sector to flourish during the late 1950s. Daniel Ferreira shows how economic policymakers after the 1964 military coup, often portrayed as pliable allies of the Brazilian bourgeoisie, managed to impose austerity and credit squeezes on the business community.

This panel should be of interest to economic historians, to scholars who are interested in the state, and to historians of Latin America more broadly.