New institutions, old organizations: legal reforms in the Brazilian housing finance

Abstract

In the last decades, several developing countries have undertaken market-oriented institutional reforms in different sectors. This paper aims to evaluate the reform of the Brazilian housing finance. For this purpose, it describes the reform “in books” and "in action", in other words, the enforcement of new legal tools. Regarding the enforcement, this paper assessed a sample of 1,007 court decisions about the Real-State Finantial System (Sistema Financeiro Imobiliário - SFI), and it shows that creditors succeeded more than debtors. Despite an environment of legal security, it has not provided a complete financial transition from the state finantial model to a market model. The state-led arrangement is still the key player in the housing finance. The most apparent effect of the reform is the repositioning of old state organizations in the new institutional frameworks. Such conclusion suggests that privatization is not necessarily a clear-cut transition between two models, but a process that is subjected to marked accommodations by factors of resilience and institutional transformation.