What explains the difference in uses of development banks for industrial policy? How did the global financial crisis affect countries’ ability to use development banks to achieve developmental aims? This seminar investigates the balance of power between private finance and countervailing groups to explain variation in post-crisis developmental financial policies in Brazil and South Africa.

Despite being faced with similar problems in combating recession and financing productive investment after the 2008 crisis, and a similar professed (centre-left) policy orientation by the ruling coalition, the two countries had very different policy responses. Differences in public development banking activities in these two countries reflect differences in the balance of power between the private financial sector and the manufacturing sector and labor unions, both in terms of their structural position in the economy, as well as their instrumental power to influence policymakers.