The paper aims to analyze theoretical and empirically the role of ports in export growth and GDP in Brazil. The port sector is strategic for the competitiveness and expansion of Brazilian market in the international market, aiming to achieve a more sustainable growth path. The work makes a diagnosis of the situation of the port infrastructure in Brazil between 2006 and 2011 and evaluates empirically, through the methodology of vector autoregressive (VAR), the effects of shocks in the main variables related to the dynamics of exports in Brazil (world income, exchange rate and capacity utilization of the ports). The analysis indicated that exports respond significantly to the behavior of the utilized capacity of ports and the exchange rate. The results show that 38% of the capacity of the ports used depends on the income of the United States and the real effective exchange rate. These results reinforce the federal government's argument that the port infrastructure is a bottleneck and show the need to increase the flow capacity of the national production, as elucidates the Provisional Measure 595/2012.