Introduction

The analysis in this chapter will focus on Brazil's main industrial business organisations, aiming to evaluate their ability to produce information, track implementation and monitor policies and disputes in their interest. Our analysis is framed by the period following the neoliberal reforms, because of the impact they had on the organisation of industrial business interests and on the overall productive regime in Brazil. Previous papers by the author with Eli Diniz (Diniz and Boschi, 2004, 2007) have emphasised that one of the main changes in the scenario after the economic reforms was that interest mediation activities shifted from the executive to the legislature, stimulated in part by the re-democratisation process taking place at the same time (throughout the 1990s) in Brazil. That shift was accompanied by a trend for organisations to professionalise, particularly as a result of the lobbying activities that came to predominate in the industrial business community's political activities, which previously had targeted the executive.

More recently, it can be assumed that, as of the Lula administration, the restoration of state capabilities and the emerging prospect of greater (developmentalist) government intervention confronted the sector with a more strategic need to monitor the economic conjuncture, while simultaneously identifying multiple executive initiatives in various different policy fields, and thus reinforced the trends of the 1990s signalled earlier.

The study presented here will focus on certain bodies that represent the interests of the industrial business community in terms of their ability to produce, analyse and monitor public policies relating directly to this segment. The structure for representing the business community's interests, and those of other prominent social actors, was set up in the 1930s with a view to structuring the capital and labour segments to meet the growing challenges posed by an industrial and urban order in Brazil. The original structure underwent significant changes over time, in particular, for the segments of capital that were able to bypass the principles of monopoly of representation that inspired the creation of the corporatist official structure under Vargas. This flexibility led to the emergence and expansion of parallel business interest organisations, defined as a function of sectors of industrial production, which, in some cases, became more important than their official counterparts (Diniz and Boschi, 1979, 1991, 1993, 1999, 2000).