Prices and progress? The link between inflation and structural change in post-war Brazil

This paper employs a multivariate time series model to examine the relationship between price increases and structural change in post-war Brazil (1945–1964). To assess this relationship, the model investigates the link between prices, the industrial share of total output in the economy, net investment and industrial sector wages. With a view to addressing criticisms commonly made of the vector autoregression (VAR) family of models, and particularly the ad hoc nature of Cholesky’s decomposition method, hypotheses drawn from the economic literature on development theory were applied to the matrix of restrictions. The findings indicate that inflation played a significant role in structural change in Brazil, while the influence of structural change on inflation was less pronounced.