His rapprochement with the Vargas government dates from this period. In 1937, he was appointed a member of the Conselho Federal de Comércio Exterior [Federal Foreign Trade Council] (CFCE), a body directly linked to the Presidency of the Republic and tasked with establishing the government's economic policy. This movement was not without its challenges. As he got closer to the State apparatus, Simonsen lost the support of some industrial peers, as was seen in the protest that led to almost 300 companies leaving FIESP as a result of his re-election as president of the organisation in 1938. During the Estado Novo, he joined the Conselho Econômico do Estado de São Paulo [São Paulo State Economic Council]. In 1942, he was appointed to the Conselho Consultivo da Coordenação da Mobilização Econômica [Consultative Council for the Coordination of Economic Mobilisation] (CME), responsible for organising the war economy. That year, he also took part in the Comissão de Imposto Sindical [Trade Union Tax Commission], linked to the Ministry of Labour. In 1944, Simonsen became a member of the Conselho Nacional de Política Industrial e Comercial [National Council for Industrial and Commercial Policy] (CNPIC), where he was part of the commission responsible for drawing up a paper on the principles that should guide Brazil's commercial and industrial development. This document proposed greater planning of the Brazilian economy. This initiative gave rise to the well-known debate between Simonsen and the liberal economist Eugênio Gudin, who was part of the newly created Planning Commission of the National Security Council and was responsible for evaluating the report, rejecting its interventionist and planning proposals.

The author of a limited body of work spread across speeches, technical publications, and various media, Simonsen built his intellectual career around topics such as the role of the State in the economy, the defence of industrialisation as a strategy to overcome backwardness, and the importance of State planning and protectionist measures for economic development. Unlike many of the economic readings in vogue at the time, Simonsen favoured historical interpretation as the key to understanding contemporary problems. Historical analysis as part of economic argumentation is one of the characteristics of his writings, already present in As crises no Brasil [The crises in Brazil], a book published in 1930, in which he tried to assess the impact of the 1929 crisis on the Brazilian economy. In this work, Simonsen realised that the Brazilian crisis was the result of external factors combined with a lack of internal productive and administrative organisation, pointing to an interdependence between the direction of public affairs and the course of the private economy. This book can be seen as representative of the shift from a focus on productive organisation, a topic present in his work since the 1910s, to a more historical-structural approach to the Brazilian economy, which would come to define his writings in the 1930s.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | (Pdf)