Policies·br_proalcool_1975

Proálcool sugar-ethanol fuel programme (Brazil, 1975)

BRA·1975 – 2019·enacted 1975-11-14candidate

movessectoral subsidy↑energy supply security↑sectoral licensing↑

What the policy did

Decreto 76.593/1975 created the Programa Nacional do Álcool (Proálcool) mandating sugar-cane ethanol blending, subsidising distillery capacity via BNDES, mandating E20-E25 gasoline blending, and by 1985 enabling ~90% of new vehicles to run on hydrous ethanol. Response to 1973 oil shock and world's largest biofuel programme at time of launch.

Policy-content fingerprint — what this policy moved, on which axes

Per invariant 3, reforms are scored by what they did on each channel-separated axis, not by the party that enacted them. This fingerprint is how the policy-match engine finds historical analogues.

intended

↑

sectoral subsidy

fiscal.sectoral_subsidy

Targeted industrial and sectoral subsidies (renewable energy, chip manufacturing, agriculture, green hydrogen, etc).

increased · strong

expanded sectoral subsidies

↑

energy supply security

regulatory.energy_supply_security

Policy posture toward energy supply security — domestic production capacity, import diversification, strategic reserves, nuclear stance, fossil-fuel mix discipline.

increased · strong

higher supply-security posture (diversified, strategic reserves)

↑

sectoral licensing

regulatory.sectoral_licensing

Sector-specific licensing regimes, concentration / quota allocation, state-controlled entry (energy, telecoms, healthcare, banking).

increased · moderate

tighter sectoral licensing / more state gating

Enacted by

brazil_geisel_abertura_1974_1979

Empirical evidence — linked hypotheses

Explicit links are curated by the author. Inferred links are hypotheses in the library that test the same axes this policy moved — the framework's answer to "what does the data say about a policy like this?".

Germany's industrial electricity prices diverged upward from a basket of comparable industrial peers (United States, France, Sweden, Norway, Finland) after the 2011 Energiewende pivot and the gap widened further through the 2014 nuclear-phase-out milestones and the 2022 gas crisis.

german_energiewende_industrial_cost_trajectoryinferred

viaregulatory.energy_supply_securityfiscal.sectoral_subsidy

refuted — Germany's industrial GVA gap on 2015-2020 average is +0.095 log (wrong sign for industrial-cost-penalty story), placebo p=0.4444444444444444.

refuted

Among high-income economies 1990-2020, services-sector competition — measured by low barriers to entry, low incumbent-protection scores, and high churn in retail, transport, communications, and professional services — predicts long-run prosperity (real GDP per capita growth and labour-productivity growth) better than manufacturing-specific industrial policy spending.

sectoral_competition_services_productivityinferred

viaregulatory.sectoral_licensingfiscal.sectoral_subsidy

PARTIAL — coef=+0.000842, p=0.361 (above α=0.05); direction inconclusive

partial

German industrial gross value added, manufacturing output, and real household income diverged materially from a synthetic-Germany donor- pool counterfactual over 2018-2025, and a variance decomposition across candidate channels attributes the majority of the divergence to regulatory-channel factors (Environmental Policy Stringency index increase post-2017, nuclear-phase-out schedule, single-supplier Russian gas dependency lock-in, industrial emission and reporting rules) rather than to fiscal-channel factors (general government consumption and tax burden were broadly stable across the Merkel late-term and Scholz years, with the debt brake in effect until 2023).

germany_decline_2018_2025_regulatory_not_fiscalinferred

viaregulatory.energy_supply_security

partial — DEU below synthetic by -0.251 cumulative over 2018-2022 (sign correct), but magnitude or placebo p=0.36363636363636365 below pre-registered thresholds…

partial

Across a broad panel of countries 1960-2019, higher trade openness predicts faster long-run convergence of real GDP per capita toward the global frontier (the United States) than industrial-policy intensity does.

trade_openness_long_run_income_convergenceinferred

viafiscal.sectoral_subsidyregulatory.energy_supply_security

PARTIAL — coef=+6.729e-18, p=0.00881; effect magnitude effectively zero

partial

Lula third-term's Nova Indústria Brasil 2024 industrial-policy package, conditioned on export performance and technology-diffusion metrics, produces measurable sectoral capability gains (semiconductors, green hydrogen, health-industrial complex) by 2030 — replicating the East Asian export-discipline conditionality pattern rather than the earlier Latin American import-substitution-industrialisation pattern.

nova_industria_brasil_export_discipline_pattern_effectinferred

viafiscal.sectoral_subsidyregulatory.energy_supply_security

INCONCLUSIVE_DATA_PENDING

run pending

Policy-driven nuclear phaseouts produce a three-order causal chain.

nuclear_phaseout_energy_cost_industry_exitinferred

viaregulatory.energy_supply_security

PARTIAL — mean_gap=+0.04357, |gap|/pre_sd=8.7, p_perm=0.25; claim direction ambiguous

partial

Biden's IRA/CHIPS industrial policy will show partial success on capacity-building metrics and mixed results on job creation, consistent with the conditional view that industrial policy works where targeting is technically competent and governance is strong.

industrial_policy_semiconductor_chips_act_effectivenessinferred

viafiscal.sectoral_subsidyregulatory.sectoral_licensing

inconclusive — Stacked: (4/4) spec-named semi-specific series unavailable on disk (oecd:STAN_INDUSTRY ISIC C26, bls:CES3133, ilostat:semiconductor employment, c…

run pending

Countries with aggressive green-transition regulatory stringency layered on top of gas-indexed wholesale electricity markets and premature phase-out of firm-dispatchable generation (Germany, UK, Belgium, Netherlands) have experienced materially higher industrial electricity prices 2015-2023 than comparable economies with more measured transition paths (France's nuclear retention, Nordic hydro, USA's shale-gas-backed grid).

green_transition_cost_trajectory_electricity_pricesinferred

viaregulatory.energy_supply_security

INCONCLUSIVE_DATA_PENDING — treatment 'aggressive_green_transition_dummy' has no within-country variation under country fixed effects

run pending

Similar historical policies

Ranked by axis-fingerprint overlap with this policy. Direction match bolded — those are the closest historical analogues. Shape of the match is what drives policy-outcome comparison, not the country or party label.

Brazil-West Germany nuclear cooperation accord (27 June 1975)

BRA·1975

match

2.4

sectoral licensingsectoral subsidyenergy supply security

Energiewende — post-Fukushima nuclear phase-out + renewable-energy acceleration

DEU·2011

match

2.4

sectoral licensingsectoral subsidyenergy supply security

Swedish nuclear new-build framework and credit guarantees (2023-2024)

SWE·2023