The purpose of this paper is to show  that a simple systemic model is able to  “imitate”  the behavior of a complex economy as the Brazilian one.The main identified features of the Brazilian economy  are:1) the short term growth rate is influenced in an important way by the effective demand; in the medium term, however, the growth is restricted by real factors such as the capital stock and the capacity to import ; 2) attempts of growing above the rate allowed by those restrictions  accelerate the inflation rate or provoke unbalance in the balance of payments; 3) in both cases, the government is forced, earlier or later, to adopt restrictive monetary policies to reduce the final demand growth rate, reducing the domestic absorption of resources; 4) an  important leverage point to reach a sustainable growth path is to create conditions for a consistent increase of the exports.      5) the growth of exports in the medium term, however,  requires significant investments in  competitiveness acquisition, without which  the country will be limited to  sell  products in international markets already saturated such as the one of commodities and, therefore, with limited  growth potential.