Burocracia brasileira destrou a economia

Sei Shiroma is, frankly, a tiny player in Brazil’s $2 trillion economy. A 29-year-old immigrant from New York, he runs a pizzeria out of the ground floor of an old apartment building near downtown Rio de Janeiro. The place seats, when tightly packed, maybe 10 people.
But Shiroma’s saga as an aspiring entrepreneur, and the bitter attitude it instilled in him, underscore one of the great ills plaguing Latin America’s biggest economy. It can be excruciatingly painful to open -- and then operate -- a business in Brazil.
Shiroma refers to the months he spent last year supervising construction and tracking down documents needed to open the restaurant as the worst time of his life. And then he delivers a damning verdict: When he expands his business, he may go somewhere in Europe rather than trying to open another pizzeria in Brazil.

“I’m still recuperating emotionally,” Shiroma says.
While Brazil’s long slide into its worst recession in 25 years has any number of high-profile causes -- from ballooning federal debt to the corruption scandal paralyzing the oil industry -- the government’s inability to untangle this bureaucratic mess is a key factor too, acting as an impediment to investment. It is one of the many structural reforms the country failed to address during the boom years of the previous decade, when soaring prices for its commodity exports papered over the gaping holes in the economy.
In the World Bank’s “Doing Business 2015” list, Brazil ranks 120th out of 189 countries. That puts it behind nations like Nicaragua, Swaziland and Lebanon. It takes 103 days to open a business in Sao Paulo, the study shows. In Mexico City, it takes six days. Four in New York City. Getting a construction permit, meanwhile, can take 400 days in Sao Paulo, more than four times the wait in Mexico City and New York.
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