Delfim Netto, economic tsar of Brazil’s military government, dies at 96

BRASILIA (Reuters) – Antonio Delfim Netto, one of Brazil’s most prominent economists who was the economics tsar of the military government in the 1970s and 1980s, died on Monday at the age of 96.

His office said he died after a week in hospital “due to complications in his health condition.”

Delfim Netto was one of the country’s longest serving finance ministers, holding the position between 1967 and 1974, and later serving as planning minister 1979-1985, years when Brazil was under military rule.

After civilian rule was restored in 1985, Delfim Netto was elected to the lower chamber of Congress five times and for decades remained an influential figure in economic and political circles, publishing his views in frequent newspaper columns.

Delfim Netto advised leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on economic policy during his first two presidential terms. In 2022, he said he would vote for Lula in the election race against far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro.

During his time as finance minister for the military government, when the policy focus was on heavy public spending, the South American country grew rapidly, hitting a record 14.4% GDP expansion in 1974, in what was called the Brazilian “economic miracle.”

Later, as planning minister in the early 1980s, he helped his country cope with a global financial meltdown caused by an oil price shock and high U.S. interest rates that triggered a debt crisis for developing countries like Brazil.

In 2012, the economist donated his library of more than 250,000 books to the University of Sao Paulo where he had graduated in 1951 in economics.

Delfim was born in 1928 in the city of Sao Paulo and grew up in the then working-class neighborhood of Cambuci, where his mother was a seamstress and his father municipal transport employee.

(Reporting by Isabel Versiani; editing by Jonathan Oatis)