Bresser-Pereira served as the Minister of Finance of Brazil in 1987, under the presidency of José Sarney, and helped propose what would eventually become the Brady Plan which solved the country's foreign debt crisis.

His main influences were Marx, Max Weber and Keynes; on the Brazilian economy, Celso Furtado e Ignácio Rangel.

As an economist, he was a classical developmentalism and a post-Keynesian; he never defined himself as a Marxist, but always remarks his intellectual admiration for him, mainly because he adopts a historico-structural methods whose origins are in Marx and Engels.

From 1963 to 1982, while maintaining his academic roles, he was vice-president of Grupo Pão de Açúcar which by 1982 had become the largest retail chain in Brazil.

In 1987 he took over the Brazilian Ministry of Finance at a moment of deep crisis that followed the failure of the Cruzado Plan: inflation reached 15% a month, while both firms and Brazil's states went bankrupt.

[3] Third, he developed a plan based on the securitization of all highly foreign indebted countries, having as reference the measures New York City had taken to bring its debt under control in the 1970s.

[4] In 1995, with the election of Fernando Henrique Cardoso to the presidency of Brazil, Bresser-Pereira took charge of the Ministry of Federal Administration and Reform of the State (MARE).

[7][8] While at the MARE, Bresser-Pereira was also president of the Latin American Center for the Administration of Development (Portuguese: Centro Latino Americano de Administração para o Desenvolvimento; CLAD) between 1995 and 1997.

Bresser-Pereira unified the academic curriculum vitae (CV) that the Federal Government requires for the evaluation of researchers under the Lattes Platform.

In the 1970s, Bresser-Pereira published three papers (1972; 1977; 1978) defending the emergence of the managerial or technobureaucratic class, which was rising in the capitalist societies and was dominant in the communist countries.

In 1986, Bresser-Pereira published Lucro, Acumulação and Crise [Profit, Accumulation and Crisis] (Editora Brasiliense, 1986) and “Growth and distribution: a revised classical model" (2018).

;[18] the book in which Bresser-Pereira develops and applies the new developmentalism’s political economy is Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Rentier Capitalism (2025).