Name: Bolsonaro says he’s pro-business, so why is Brazil's economy in the dumps?
Uploaded: 2021-12-31T17:45:52.000Z
Duration: 15 min 39 s
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For years, it was one of the fastest-growing economies in the world.

基礎被動語態

At the turn of the century, Brazil was touted for its huge economic potential.

The South American country was named alongside Russia, India and China as the emerging markets

with the capacity to eclipse the world's biggest economies.

They even had a popular acronym – BRIC.

Brazil briefly overtook the United Kingdom as the  world's sixth-largest economy in 2012.

I'm Laura Carvalho, I am an associate professor in the Economics Department at the University of Sao Paolo.

Laura is the author of a best-selling book on the rise and fall of the Brazilian economy.

And it's organized in chapters: the step forward, the step sideways

and the step backwards of that waltz, right?

So the idea there is to try to explain why Brazil went from an economic boom in the 2000s.

But then from 2011 up until 2014, you had a slowdown in the Brazilian economy.

This was due both to changes in the external sector, but also what I consider some mistakes

And then finally, you had the step backwards, and I think we're still there today.

So, you had a very deep economic recession in 2015 and 2016, also a lot of political turmoil.

This political turmoil later fuelled the rise of an unlikely candidate in the 2018 Brazilian general election:

The president is one of the most dangerous social media influencers in Brazil.

When Bolsonaro arrived, it was as if a rock star had arrived.

People were just flocking towards him, elbowing each other to get a picture with him.

Just like the U.S.'s Donald Trump, right-wing firebrand Bolsonaro was, at the start, dismissed

Gustavo Ribeiro is a journalist based in São Paulo.

He is the founder of the Brazilian Report, which covers the country's politics and

economics for a foreign audience in English.

At the Brazilian Report, we were one of the first to actually take Bolsonaro seriously.

In the Brazilian press, if you take what had been written about Bolsonaro leading up to

the 2018 elections, he was merely disregarded as this joke candidate, a sort of a rogue,

far-right person who would not get that far.

They are granted space according to their congressional representation.

And the bigger your coalition is, the more space you have.

Leading up to 2018, Bolsonaro did not have a coalition and he had something like 18 seconds

of airspace per day, just ridiculously little.

But what many pundits fail to realize was that voter behavior was changing a lot and

the reliance of voters on social media to get their news and to get political content

And Bolsonaro, he was on campaign mode for years.

Bolsonaro's promises to tackle corruption and organized crime helped him clinch victory

in a country exhausted by political scandal and high murder rates.

Brazil is a country that sees around like 55 – 60,000 murders a year.

We have a big chunk of the population which has either suffered violence or know someone

And then Bolsonaro comes offering quick, magical solutions.

That in his opinion, violence must be fought with even harsher violence.

But of course, it's ludicrous. It doesn't work.

But in people's minds, he is offering a solution.

People don't want to hear that okay, we have to start reforming how law enforcement

works and improving people's quality of life and maybe in 10-15 years,

People want, now, to be able to go to a bus stop and not worry if they're going to get

mugged or stabbed or shot, which is a real concern in a lot of peripheral areas in Brazil.

During our deep economic recession that started at the end of 2014, but was actually worse

during 2015 and '16, you had at the same time a big corruption scandal that was linked

to what they called the 'Car Wash Operation'.

So the 'Carwash Operation' was looking into corruption inside the Brazilian oil company

The investigation was called “Operation Car Wash” because it was first discovered

What started out as a money-laundering investigation soon grew to implicate business figures, politicians

and even two former Brazilian presidents, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff.

It's not that the corruption itself caused the economic crisis.

There are many other explanations for that crisis, including the big fall in oil prices.

While Bolsonaro was hard on crime, running the economy wasn't his forte.

Instead, he left the running of the show to businessman and free-market advocate Paulo

Guedes to lead reforms such as tax-cuts and deregulation.

Paulo Guedes is someone who was promoting from the beginning, the privatization of all

the public enterprises in Brazil, all the public companies, the reduction of the size

of the state in all areas, including health and education.

These reforms painted Bolsonaro as pro-market, winning him the support of Brazil's business elite.

We will work to lower the tax burden, streamline rules and make life easier for those who wish

to produce and do business as entrepreneurs, invest and create jobs.

But the big economic turnaround they were hoping for never happened.

When the pandemic hit, very quickly, there was a recognition in society that it would

be impossible to have people stay home and comply to any type of restrictions and sanitary

contingency measures if they didn't have any source of income.

His handling of it was catastrophic, he waited a long time to buy the vaccines.

Everyone wanted the vaccines, the anti-vax movement in Brazil is very small.

In October 2021, Bolsonaro released a video to his millions of social media followers,

claiming there was a link between Covid-19 vaccines and AIDS.

Facebook and YouTube all jumped into action to remove the post.

He often touts unproven treatments against Covid.

He went against scientific consensus on almost every issue regarding the pandemic.

Despite the fact that Bolsonaro oversaw one of the world's most disastrous COVID responses,

congress approved what went on to become Brazil's biggest welfare program in history, which

paid around $110 a month to about 60 million vulnerable workers.

It doesn't seem a lot but that actually is more money than many

people in Brazil have ever seen in just a month.

That reduced extreme poverty levels in Brazil to the lowest on record, and then that propelled

Bolsonaro to the biggest approval ratings of his administration.

In 2020, I would say that the Brazilian economy actually behaved relatively better if you

compare it to the rest of the world, and this is only due to the cash relief big program.

But of course, this was not the initiative of Bolsonaro's government.

It was actually a lot of pressure from civil society and social movements and so on.

At the same time, because of that emergency program that was so strong, he started to

get more support of low-income voters that he did not in the election.

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Bolsonaro says he’s pro-business, so why is Brazil's economy in the dumps?

potential

pandemic

crisis

sustainable