Brazil: Leading the Brics

The process of integration of economies around the world, known as globalisation, has catalysed the development of Brazil as a powerful emerging economy, through the expansion of trade and investment. Emerging countries are defined as those progressing toward becoming more advanced, through rapid growth and industrialisation. Consequently, Brazil’s rapid economic growth has secured its place in BRICS, an association of five major emerging economies, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.

Brazil with a population around 201,032,714, is the largest South America’s country. Brazil’s most important components of its GDP are service revenues, wide industry sector and its successful agriculture.

Brazil is a leading emerging economy in the world today. Other economies in this category include; Russia, India, South Africa and china excluding Hong Kong and Macau. There has been a real transformation in the Brazil economy in the 21st century. The country 's location is in Latin America and is one of the motivating economies in the world market. It has experienced rapid growth, price stability, and fiscal responsibility (Czinkota 2010).

Brazil is often viewed as a fun filled country, with beautiful beaches, beautiful people and fantastic soccer players. While all of these may hold true, especially the soccer part, having won 5 FIFA World Cups and also hosting the 2014 version of the event, Brazil has proven to be an emerging market with a lot of potential. Based on the East coast and stretching well into the central area of South America, the Federative Republic of Brazil, as it is officially known as, is a country made up of 26 states and it occupies almost half of the South American continent. It current capital city is Brasilia, while it also has 14 large cities with populations of over one million including Sao Paolo (12 million), Rio de Janeiro (6 million) and

Throughout the 1950s, Brazil continued to see a great deal of economic growth under President Juscelino Kubitschek and his vice president Joao Goulart. Goulart had previously been Vargas’ Minister of labour and was unpopular with the military because he was viewed as dangerously left wing. He was on the ticket because of the coalition between the Labour Party and the Social Democratic Party that had brought Kubitschek to power. (Calvert 1990, 127) Kubitschek unleased a program of accelerated progress that aimed at “fifty years of progress in five,” but despite making Kubitschek a popular leader, even at the end of his term, he left the country with high inflation due to the debts take on to help industrialize. His successor’s attempts to address the situation were hugely unpopular with the poor and he left office less than a year after election, and he was replaced by Goulart. (Wiarda 1996, 122-124)

On the surface, Brazil does not appear as a country ravaged by poverty however, portions of it are; and its environmental stability is an enormous factor of this. In 2000 the United Nations concocted a plan to assist countries like Brazil; thus the Millennium Development Goals emerged. In essence, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs for short) are a set of targets set to challenge extreme poverty across the globe. As Brazil is not a ‘traditional’ country in the subject of poverty so a specific target had to be included for it to fit in with the MDGs. Target 9 includes two factors: the amount of land covered by forest and the protection of biodiversity, which pinpoint Brazil as a country in need. In Brazil, tourism and the need for lumber are dwindling both the biodiversity of the country, as well as cutting down on the area of land covered by forest. Therefore, Brazil’s ecology and demand for resources cause it to be looked at as a country in need, despite its modernization being equivalent to the rest of the world. With this being said, Brazil’s ecosystem has remained relatively unaffected by change in the last two decades. It will be challenging for Brazil to achieve the seventh Millennium Development Goal of ensuring environmental stability due its lack of a strong governmental structure, a dwindling economy, and the miniscule amount of groups assisting Brazil.

Envisage a country named after a wood product. Such a country exists in Eastern South America. Brazil has been tremendously influenced by European life and evidence of that can be perceived through their culture. Made up of various types of resources, Brazil has continued to flourish. However, problems have arose along with the growth of the population. Deforestation, an outcome of human action has affected the millions of exotic species that live in one of the treasures of Brazil, the Amazon Rainforest.

According to a survey by Transparency International, Brazil ranked 72nd out of 180 countries when it comes to corruption. This is even higher than economies like Turkey, Bulgaria and Cuba (BRAZIL, n.d.).

In the past 20 years the Brazilian economy and government have overcome many difficult and major monetary problems. During the period of time from the 1980s to the 1990s Brazil experienced widespread inflation, leading to the devaluation of the Brazilian currency. This in turn hindered efforts at economic expansion and growth. The politicians and economists of the time did not know how to stop inflation from growing, and the GDP of Brazil in the 1990s fell by more than 80 percent, hitting an all-time low. In addition to monetary problems, like other South American countries Brazil was battling high rates of government corruption. In fact President Collor de Mello was impeached due to charges of corruption during September of 1992. Inflation was running very high in the midst of the 1990’s for Brazil and though many government leaders had promised to combat it since the 1980s, unfortunately their plans failed to work (The Real Plan, 2013, January 1). Thankfully, one man came up with the “Real Plan” which in fact worked and eliminated high inflation. After a successful recovery under the Real plan, Brazil would be hit in the future by two more economic crises: the South American economic crisis of 2002 and economic crisis of 2008, which had originated in the U.S. The economic crisis of 2008 was felt throughout the world, but thankfully Brazilian experience with the high inflation rates and economic crisis during the 1990’s helped them better prepare for the economic problems

Brazil is arguably the leading economy in Latin America. As the fifth largest country in the world, Brazil benefits from massive natural resources and human capital. Largely, the abuse of both these resources has inspired significant economic growth in the past forty years. However, human development has not risen equivalent to economic growth. Furthermore, though average gross domestic product per capita has increased over the years, imbalance remains at a shockingly high rate. An important contributing factor to continuous income inequality is the low fulfillment and low quality of education in Brazil.

The first subject matter is that of President Temer of Brazil who made an announcement at a recent press conference with both speakers of the house, and that he is going to block the controversial bribe amnesty. This has been controversial for him as if the regulation were approved and President Temer didn’t void the legislation then he would basically be giving free pardons to politicians who receive illegal contributions for their own personal campaigns. This, basically means that Brazil would not be staying true to the countries values of democracy, as they would continue to be swayed by the interest of the person or persons who pay them.

Originally intended to combat the 2008 recession, however since the large boom of brazil’s economy, public spending has continued to grow, with public spending at high levels and inflation currently at 6% a full 1.5% above the target level of 4.5%, the fiscal policy has the potential to create major issues for Brazils long-term growth and sustainability. With the need to cut around 2.5% of Government spending in order to continue to have a surplus whilst re-paying loans and interest on its loans Brazil could see its decrease in unequal wealth distribution reversed and actually cause further polarisation by being unable to fund the least wealthiest. Brazil’s need to reduce its spending comes at a difficult with more expenses than usual to deal with, such as the world cup in 2014 and The Olympics in 2016, meaning public money needs to be invested increasing infrastructure such as sport venues, roads and airports. This could cause problems to Brazil’s continued development and success, however if done to success Brazil could benefit from these great sporting events with possible increased trade, exposure and tourism.

Brazil’s infrastructure was a barrier to enhancing competitiveness. Therefore, the president announced the introduction of PAC-2, which was the second phase of the Growth Acceleration Program, which started under President Lula. The focus of the program was to improve transport, energy, logistics, and sanitation. PAC-2 comprised of R$959-billion pledge, which was supposed to be invested between

Brazil is being considered as a growing economy. In fact the country, one of the BRIC nations is seen by analyst of Goldman Sachs as one of the five nations that will be at the top of all nations with regard to a country`s GDP (The Goldman Sachs Group Inc., 2007). To understand Brazil`s current situation and how the country may be able to grow out of this position as a global player in the near future aiming a better globalization of the country by the year 2050, one has to see Brazil within a bigger frame. Within this frame, actions taken have to be integrated into the five obstacles Brazil currently faces.

While researching text written on the effects of global financial crisis 2008-2009 on Brazil?s economy, I found some financial analysts that had published documentations in reference to the impact on the Brazilian economy. These authors discussed in research papers, financial journals, newspapers, pamphlets, and brochures on how Brazil?s state and local-owned banks, international banks and its government and monetary policies reactions to the global financial crisis 2008-2009. My goals in this paper, is to examine the impacts of the global financial crisis on the Brazil?s economy, and measures taken by government regulatory and banking policies that led to mitigating the impact of the global financial crisis of 2008-2009.