Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV)

A quasi-governmental but politically independent research and education center, the Getúlio Vargas Foundation (Fundação Getúlio Vargas—FGV) was created in 1944 by Luís Simões Lopes, the head of the Departamento Administrativo do Serviço Público (DASP), during the Estado Nôvo as part of an effort to make the bureaucracy more efficient and professional. The FGV studies administrative problems and trains future administrators.

In the early 2000s, FGV is a vast complex of institutes, schools, centers, and a press that provides scholarly impetus in economics, public administration, accounting, education, human resources, political science, contemporary history, and documentation. FGV economists established the Instituto Brasileiro de Economia (IBRE) and the publications Revista Brasileira de Economia and Conjuntura Econômica, as well as a graduate school in economics. They have provided three finance ministers, a minister of planning, a president of the Central Bank, and a president of the National Development Bank (BNDE). In public administration, the FGV created two graduate schools and a research center (Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo) and two journals, Revista de Administração Pública and Revista de Administração de Empresas. Similar leadership has been exercised in political science with the Instituto de Direito Público e Ciência Política (INDIPO), which offers graduate courses and publishes the Revista de Ciência Política. Linked to INDIPO is perhaps the best-organized archive in Latin America, the Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de História Contemporanea (CPDOC). CPDOC focuses on post-1930 Brazilian political history and has the personal papers of most of the men who shaped the 1930–1964 period.

See alsoBrazil, Organizations: National Bank for Economic Development (BNDE).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Robert T. Daland, ed., Perspectives of Brazilian Public Administration (1963).

Israel Beloch and Alzira Alves De Abreu, eds., Dicionário histórico-biográfico brasileiro, 1930–1983, vol. 2 (1984), 1407–1408.

W. Michael Weis, "The Fundação Getúlio Vargas and the New Getúlio," in Luso-Brazilian Review, 24, no. 2 (1987): 49-60.

Additional Bibliography

Lamounier, Bolivar, Dionísio Dias Carneiro Netto, and Marcelo de Paiva Abreu. 50 Years of Brazil: 50 Years of Getulio Vargas Foundation. Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Getulio Vargas, Editoraa, 1995.

                                      W. Michael Weis