Desenvolvimento econômico, dinâmica da indústria e suas implicações sobre o regime geral de Previdência Social.

Abstract

This research relates the reforms of the general pension system to the economic development model and industry dynamics. Between the decades of 1930 and 1980, Brazil underwent significant transformations, with a notable growth in the industrial sector. To enable this growth, throughout this period, the developmental economic model was adopted, where industrialization became synonymous with development. The industry began to receive special state protection, particularly through the policy of import substitution, ensuring tariff protection for the domestic industry against competition from external products. In this scenario, the pension system also expanded as an essential institution to ensure the expansion of wage labor and the supply of workforce to the industrial sector, in addition to serving as a political tool to reduce tension between capital and labor. In the early 1990s, influenced strongly by neoliberal ideology, there was a departure from the old development model, and the industry ceased to receive state protection with a rushed commercial liberalization policy and a sudden reduction in import tariffs. As a result, a significant portion of the industrial sector succumbed to competition from cheaper and more technologically advanced foreign products in a short period of time. Over the last 30 years, the industrial sector has lost significance in its contribution to the GDP, and its connection with the pension system's development has been severed. In a new reality of a strong reduction in the state's ability to intervene in the market, loss of decision-making power over investment, and privatization, the pension system has become the target of constant attacks, being pointed out as the main source of fiscal imbalance threatening the state's solvency. Added to this, the service sector gains prominence as the largest source of job generation, though mostly offering low-skilled and low-paying jobs, precarious employment relationships, and high turnover rates, which affect the pension system's contributory base. Faced with this scenario, the pension system has undergone successive constitutional and legal reforms that have altered the originally envisioned system and made the criteria for accessing benefits much more stringent. The overarching objective of this research is to address the emergence of the pension system in Brazil and its relationship with the process of industrialization and wage labor expansion, with emphasis on the decades from 1930 to 1980. The shift in the economic development model, with the primarization of the economy, initiated in the 1990s and marked by the reduced industrial share in the GDP, is reflected in the diminished importance of the pension system as a mechanism to ensure worker rights, especially

for wage laborers. Methodologically, the research draws upon historical neo- institutionalism, highlighting the significance of institutions (such as the pension

system) and the weight of the past as an important category to explain and corroborate the hypothesis posited in this work. The chosen methodological tools include literature review, documentary and legal-normative research, and data collection from official sources.