as a result of the 1988 constitution, which created advantages for various segments of society without indicating how these advantages would be paid for. Moreover, it transferred large portions of the tax revenues from the federal government to state and municipal governments, without requiring them to provide additional public services. With less revenue and more responsibility, the federal accounts experienced growing deficits. In addition, several subsidies were locked into the legislation. These factors and the financial burden of the public debt meant growing problems of public finance. The 1980s ended with high and accelerating inflation and a stagnant economy, which never recovered after the demise of the Cruzado Plan. The public debt was enormous, and the government was required to pay very high interest rates to persuade the public to continue to buy government debt instruments. Another major obstacle to economic growth during the 1980s was Brazil's protectionist policy from 1984 to 1992 of severely restricting imports of foreign computer hardware and software to protect and nurture Brazil's domestic computer industry (which was but one manifestation of the country's long-term policy of import substitution industrialization). The policy was so strict that the government regularly seized personal computers from foreign businesspersons who were visiting for ordinary business trips, because of the fear that foreign visitors were smuggling PCs to domestic users. Although this policy was superficially successful, the federal government failed to fund the basic research that was essential to the success of computer industries in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Brazilian computer users in this era frequently paid two or three times the international market price for unreliable, poorly designed domestic clones of foreign computer designs, since domestic manufacturers lacked the well-trained engineers and basic research necessary to develop their own indigenous innovations, let alone build brilliant new designs from scratch. By the time the policy was rescinded in 1991, it had failed in the sense that Brazil's domestic computer manufacturers were still unable to make advanced computer products suitable for export to other countries, and had severely limited the modernization and computerization of Brazil's economy. By that point in time, computer usage in most economic sectors in most developed countries was exceeding 90 percent. In Brazil, computer usage by businesses was around 12 percent. Even worse, Brazilian schools were falling far behind in preparing students to use computers when they entered the workforce; only 0.5 percent of Brazilian