This paper documents the empirical relationship in postwar Brazil between the GNP and other key variables such as consumption, investment, productivity and hours worked. Since many of those series were not available to Brazil we also had to build a data-set, which includes consumption of non-durables, capital and hours worked. We use two filters to extract the cycles (the usual Hodrick-Prescott filter and a band-pass filter); this procedure was taken to avoid conclusions that depend too much on the filter in use. The paper also provides simulations of two dynamic general equilibrium models (the standard RBC model and the indivisible labor model) and tries to match the facts of the artificial economy with those of the actual economy. We show that the basic models fail to replicate some of the observed facts.