Brazil is the fifth biggest country in land area behind Russia, Canada, China, and the US, it has roughly 210 million inhabitants. Brazil was the country with the eighth largest GDP in the world in 2017 and it is a very resource rich country. Brazil has a lot of regional influence: it is the largest country in South America and, excepting Chile and Uruguay, is the most politically and economically stable country in the subcontinent (Chile and Uruguay are not big economies, though). Why isn’t Brazil a World superpower, then? That’s a tough question; there are multiple factors that help explain Brazil’s lack of protagonism in the World stage. I usually credit these four factors: lack of infrastructure, old-fashioned and non-evidence-based economic policies, corruption, and provincial conservatism. Brazil will never be a superpower if it does not recognize the need to tackle the worst problems within.
Brazil has a serious infrastructure problem: it is a massive country (8.5 million ; 3.2 million ) with a very costly and inefficient road system which serves very poorly the production centers of the country. For a country that occupies roughly 48% of South America, it is almost unbelievable that there isn’t a robust railway system throughout most of the territory. Brazilian cities grow without any restraint, public sanitation, or urban planning. Roads are poorly kept and often are full of holes. Brazil has an immense coast line, but has a enfeebled Naval Force; Brazil has large maritime and land borders, but there is no way of defending them because the armed forces sometimes fail to feed their own stock. The Northern region is dominated by the Amazon forest — a very complicated place to generate economic activity — and most of the fertile productive land is in the South and Southeast. Economic development only arrived in remote areas of the Midwest and the North after the 1960’s, when the capital was moved to Brasília and colonies of Southerners migrated to the north to expand farming to those areas. Brazil depends a lot on government enterprises — as a rule, extremely inefficient, costly, and sometimes in debt — which constantly are targeted by greedy politicians looking for easy and illegal fortune.
As I’ve tried to champion here on Quora, I believe that another of Brazil's woes is its tradition of economic mismanagement. Here’s the context: It is known that most developed countries went through phases of protectionism and state-sponsored investments in infrastructure. Brazil is not (yet?) a developed country, but it went through a similar phase during most of the 20th century. Between 1930 and 1980, Brazil ceased to be rural and became an industrialized country. This transformation was brought by developmental policies during the governments of Getúlio Vargas (1930–1945, 1950–1954), Juscelino Kubitcheck (1955–1960), and during the Military Dictatorship (1964–1985). Developmental Economics did have an important part in making Brazil an economic powerhouse during the second half of the 20th century, but it became horribly obsolete: Brazilian economy stagnated during the 80’s and, thanks to Brazilian developmental policies and bad policymaking, high inflation ravaged the economy during the late 80’s and early 90’s. It is also worth to mention that during the Vargas Dictatorship and during the Military Dictatorship thousands of peasants and native Brazilians were displaced (and/or killed) in order to build some infrastructural behemoths such as the many hydroelectric powerplants throughout the country. It also became a machine for inequality: “national champions” policies and high inflation always made sure that the richer would become richer while the poor would always become poorer. Brazilian Developmental Economics simply cannot handle globalization, the modern labor market, social justice, and environmentalism. I honestly think that Brazil should thank Beluzzo and Bresser-Pereira for whatever good deeds they claim to have done, but Brazil should abandon their economic thought and think about how to best itself in the 21st century.
One of the biggest issues in Brazil is the combination between national champions policies (an inherently bad idea) with a total lack of transparency in the political world. It is the perfect recipe for corruption. We also need to acknowledge the presence of a very predatory oligarchical elite which is mostly interested in make itself more rich and powerful. They do it by creating media monopolies for themselves, by keeping lands for themselves (latifundia), by stifling innovation and killing venture capital opportunities, creating mazes of bureaucracy to validate contracts, by strengthening the hold of a few people on industries and resources. This is all done via protectionism. Protectionism, developmental Economics and corruption always come together (I recognize it can be different in a different country, but not in Brazil). Corruption has been perpetuated by a vicious cycle of election campaign funding from the “national champions” to political parties: in the US, a company normally funds the party that is most aligned to the company’s ideology. In Brazil, the national champions donate to all political parties in exchange for government contracts regardless of the winner. For instance, in the 2014 Presidential elections, Odebrecht, a construction behemoth, legally donated R$ 25 million to PT, PMDB and PSDB, the three biggest parties of Brazilian politics that always are at odds with each other. Corruption is a bigger problem in municipal and state politics because media coverage is mostly local and scandals do not have the same repercussion as in the national level.
Perhaps the easiest issue to fix, however, is the provincial conservative culture of the country. Brazil has been an isolationist country for most of its existence. Thanks to the idea of Brazil that our elites had during the second half of the 20th century (paragraphs above discuss better the issue), Brazil chose to keep itself isolated from the flows of change that History brings. While most of the World’s middle class is very cosmopolitan with a very open culture towards difference, the Brazilian intelligentsia is very provincial, very clever about ways of maintaining its class privileges, and extremely suspicious of change. There is nothing more disgusting than a trade unionist talking about the marvels of Socialism but being petty and demanding respect and privileges for his/her class. There is nothing more annoying than a University Professor who, despite years of supposed rational thought, fall prey to the most ridiculous partisan positions. There is nothing more repugnant than social justice activist not taking political positions due to pressure from religious groups. There is nothing more loathsome than so-called progressives defending an economic agenda of inequality. There is nothing more frustrating than seeing a lot of respectful Brazilians adopting these ways because they don’t know better. Since no one escapes Globalization, I honestly hope that the winds of cultural change blow in Brazil and help to fix at least this issue. It would be a good first step. Maybe perhaps then we could see Brazil becoming one more world superpower some decades in the future.
Source: https://www.quora.com/
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