Potencial de crescimento econômico do Brasil em dúvida

Brazil, Country of the Future No More?

Andrés Velasco

SANTIAGO – During a visit to Rio de Janeiro last year, US President Barack Obama told a cheering crowd that Brazil is the country of the future no more. “For so long, you were...told to wait for a better day that was always just around the corner,” Obama said. “Meus amigos, that day has finally come.”
Is Obama right? At first blush, the answer would seem to be an unambiguous yes. Brazil today is democratic, and its president gets to sit next to Russian, Indian, and Chinese leaders at much-publicized “BRIC” summits. The economy weathered the crisis triggered by Lehman Brothers’ collapse in 2008, and mounted a vigorous recovery in 2010. Brazil not only remains a top football power, but it will host the World Cup in 2014 – and the Summer Olympics two years after that.

But dig a little deeper and a more complex picture emerges. An apartment in a fashionable São Paulo neighborhood may cost as much as it would in London or New York, but, when it comes to competitiveness, Brazil ranks 53rd on the most recent World Economic Forum index – just ahead of Mauritius and Azerbaijan, and behind Malta and Sri Lanka...
But how fast Brazil can grow, and for how long, remains in question...
The key growth constraint is lack of domestic savings...

Both the private and public sector in Brazil under-save, but the government’s dearth of savings is the bigger problem. It is not for lack of revenue: Brazil’s tax receipts as a share of GDP are the highest in Latin America. The problem is a state that invests far too little because it has locked up too much money in inflexible current expenditure.
Public-sector pensions are a good example. A recent report by the bank Itaú estimates that in 2010, the social-security system covering private-sector workers spent 6.8% of GDP on benefits granted to 24 million people. In the same year, the system for public-sector workers spent about 2.1% of GDP on benefits – but for fewer than three million people. In other words, the average government pensioner’s benefits are 2.5 times higher than what the average private-sector retiree receives...

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