terça-feira, outubro 16, 2007

Brazil’s role in the world

Artigo escrito em resposta a questionamentos de um colega americano.

“I can tell you that here in the U. S., many people consider Brazil not only to be a rapidly rising economic power, but a model for the rest of South America. I would love to hear more about your ideas about that.”


I believe that all comes to one question: “Does economic growth comes with welfare? Does economic growth represent anything to the population? Does the statistical economic growth affects peoples lives in such a way that they can really feel it?”

We have to think about what is being said about Brazil’s growth: Is Brazil really growing rapidly? I am not too sure about this. In fact, last year we made only + 2.9% (in relation to 2005) and + 2.3% in 2005 (comparing to 2004). We were second worst in Latin America and for the 10 last years our GDP has grown under the global average.

We can compare with countries like China (I know that it’s different over there) and also Chile, South American. Chile’s growth has been constantly high. Most of it can be explained by their commercial politics and specially because their economy size is smaller than ours. The bigger the economy, the harder it is to change things. Venezuela grew 10% and Argentina 8.5%, but their inflation also grew a lot: 13,4% and 8% respectively. At least inflation is under control here.

The key factor, in fact, is not the economical side, it is political. Since the military governments, Brazilian politicians promise/say that Brazil is the country of the future. We still believe it and are still waiting. But how long will we have to wait? They/we expect to become a developed country too fast, as if we went to bed being poor and wake up millionaire. What are the odds? The population is not worried about growing consistently; we just want to be big.

It is imperative to talk about the Brazilian political structure and situation. When in 2003 Lula, a machinist, became the president (the first “leftist” elected by the population – you can think of that as a vote for the change), a sense of euphoria and hope aroused. We had thought that he would solve all our problems – that’s also a problem here: we do not vote for a political party or the ideals of each party, we vote for the person. It is obvious that he didn’t make it and, for that, is still being criticized as if he had betrayed his own people. He is criticized for not making any critical changes, only maintaining the liberal political system. We also have to talk about corruption in the government, which has been discovered by the media and made his government popularity decrease. There are Ministers under investigations on it. In the same direction we have to talk about violence, which is also increasing. The social gap is something impressive. In the same neighborhood we can find mansions and shacks. The favelas are growing. PUC-Rio, which is one of the best and most expensive Universities in Rio is right next to the “Rocinha” favela, the biggest in Latin America (about 1 million people live there).

The political factor is something to be considered overseas as well. Lula has been to a few “under development” countries, in Africa specially, creating important alliances and developing the South-South relation, which is really important if we are to assume a leadership in the world. Of course, the “Itamaraty”, Ministry of External Relations’ role is something to consider. Being apolitical, stable and not changing the Brazilian’s diplomatic course of action over the years and over the governments gives us much more of an international credit.

In my opinion, and I have to go deeper on this subject, the desire of being big and relevant to the world comes from colonization. We were the only “nation” in South America that spoke Portuguese. Then, when the Portuguese Court came to Brazil (running away from the French Revolution), we became an “empire”. We were seen as different from the other countries over here, because we were a bit better than a colony (Monarchy). From then on, Brazil thinks of itself as better than it’s neighbors. Nowadays, our size, “stability”, political action, liberal system, respect to the international treaties, respect to human rights, controlled inflation, good place for investments, etc makes us a potential regional leader.