Reestimating Brazil’s GDP growth from 1820 to 1980: a note on ongoing research by Edmar Bacha, Guilherme Tombolo, and Flavio Versiani (11/2025).
Introduction Our research on reestimating Brazil’s GDP and GDP per capita growth from 1820 to 1980 currently consists of three papers: “Reestimating Brazil’s GDP Growth from 1900 to 1980,” published in Revista Brasileira de Economia in 2023; “A Note on Brazil’s Historical GDP per Capita Growth Rates,” published in the same journal in 2024; and “Secular Stagnation? A New View on Brazil’s Growth in the 19th Century,” published in Revista de Historia Económica/Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History in September 2025. These papers have generated considerable interest in the research community, as exemplified by Villela (2025), for 1900-1980, and by Bogart et al. (2024), for 1820- 1900. This note elaborates on their content and outlines new related research that our papers have stimulated or that is being conducted independently.