Brasil vive período de 'milagres econômicos', diz jornal britânico The Independent

9 de julho, 2010
Brasil vive período de "milagres econômicos", diz jornal britânico

O bom momento econômico do Brasil é tema de uma reportagem de duas páginas publicada nesta sexta-feira pelo diário britânico The Independent.

Sob o título "No topo do mundo", o correspondente do diário em São Paulo, David Usborne, afirma que "não é possível passar um dia no Brasil sem sentir os milagres econômicos que acontecem" no país.

A reportagem ocupa as duas páginas centrais do jornal, acompanhada de uma grande foto da estátua do Cristo Redentor no Corcovado e de outra com o presidente Lula em sua recente viagem ao Quênia.

A reportagem afirma que o Brasil "é um país que se moveu para longe dos clichês de sua marca internacional". "Brasília está agoniada sobre como manter o controle sobre seu boom econômico, enquanto o resto de nós (na Europa) está brigando sobre os respectivos benefícios da austeridade para cortar o déficit versus os gastos para estimular a economia", observa o jornalista.

A reportagem comenta ainda a proximidade das eleições presidenciais deste ano, em outubro, citando as pesquisas que apontam uma disputa acirrada entre a ex-ministra Dilma Rousseff, candidata do presidente Lula, contra o ex-governador de São Paulo José Serra.

O jornal diz que o próximo presidente vai herdar um país em plena efervescência, com a perspectiva da realização da Copa do Mundo de 2014, da Olimpíada de 2016 e da exploração das vastas reservas de petróleo em águas profundas.

O texto lembra que o Brasil permanece um dos países com grand desigualdade entre ricos e pobres, segundo o Banco Mundial, mas observa que essa diferença caiu bastante durante o governo Lula. "O número de pessoas vivendo abaixo da linha de pobreza caiu durante os dois mandatos de Lula de 50 milhões para 30 milhões".

A reportagem diz ainda que o Brasil teve a sorte de encontrar grandes reservas de petróleo em águas profundas, comenta sua aproximação com a China e também a duradoura estabilidade econômica conquistada.

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On top of the world: Why Brazil is booming
By David Usborne
Friday, 9 July 2010

AFP/ GETTY IMAGES

Blessed in show: The refurbished Christ the Redeemer statue at the Corcovado hill, in Rio de Janeiro

AFP/ GETTY IMAGES

The popular President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva

You cannot spend a day in Brazil without sensing the economic miracles happening here – first quarter growth touched 9 per cent and the helicopter pads atop the skyscrapers of Sao Paulo are buzzing with air traffic again – or hearing of the achievements of its President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, recently named one of the world's most influential leader by Time Magazine, in raising the country's profile on the world stage and lifting much of the population out of poverty. The somewhat lefty party-goers were not actually thinking of Lula and Brazil as they sang about daddy and his baby, but they could have been.

The legacy of President Lula, a former lathe operator, is a conversation point if only because the race to succeed him kicks off this week. The constitution bars him running for a third term. While his hand-picked successor in the ruling Worker's Party, Dilma Rousseff, is an electoral virgin (she was his chief-of-staff), polls suggest she will prevail on election day in early October, thwarting the hopes of conservative opposition leader José Serra, a former governor of Sao Paulo state.

Ms Rousseff will inherit a country bursting with fruit. As if it wasn't enough that Brazil was already to host the next soccer World Cup, Rio de Janeiro last year barged aside Chicago to win selection as host city to the 2016 Summer Olympics. This as Brazil rushes to exploit vast reserves of oil off its shoreline close to Rio. Rather than giving them pause, the crisis afflicting the deep-sea drilling industry in the Gulf of Mexico is if anything spurring Brazil to move more quickly to increase production. Oil revenues now stand at 12 per cent of the national GDP and may rise to as much as 20 per cent.

It is a country that has moved far beyond the clichés of its international brand – the contours of its tanned beach-goers and catwalk models. Brasilia is agonising about keeping control of its economic boom while the rest of us are squabbling about the respective benefits of deficit-slashing austerity versus stimulus spending. (President Lula apparently thought that debate sufficiently boring that he did not show up to the recent G20 summit in Canada citing flooding in north-eastern Brazil.) The chatter, at this party and elsewhere, risks running away with itself. "They get a little bit carried away," a correspondent for a foreign news agency whispers, citing Brazilian diplomats telling him that China is investing in Brazil so feverishly because it sees it overtaking the United States soon as its most important export market. Come now.

Look hard enough and you will find people in Brazil willing to identify those things that are not going so well, like the failure to invest in infrastructure (Sao Paulo's international airport is grittier than a Greyhound bus stop), Brazil's inability to upgrade school-age education and the still utterly byzantine ways of its bureaucracy and taxation system. Steve Jobs recently rejected a plea from the city government in Rio de Janeiro to open an Apple shop there. He shot back that the "super-crazy" tax system in Brazil "makes it very unattractive to invest in the country" and that "many high-tech companies feel that way". In all the pro-Brazil hoopla, this rude rebuff by Jobs registered with no one except a few attentive bloggers.

That Brazil is on the move, threatening to leave its similarly aspiring neighbours like Argentina and Mexico in the dust, is no longer in dispute, however. China has been in the know for years, but that is because it long ago turned to Brazil for so many of its desperately needed raw materials – everything from soy to iron ore to lumber. Now others are starting to pay attention. If Brazil, the B in the so-called BRIC group of fast-emerging nations (the others are Russia, India and China), is indeed on a path towards eventually joining the ranks of the developed nations, no one wants to be caught by surprise.

Thus the awful international airport in Sao Paulo is fit to burst only in part because Brazilians are discovering that having a relentless rising currency – the Real – is a marvellous thing when travelling abroad. Adding to the traffic are the foreign businessmen and investors galloping into town, cheque books at the ready, to find out what is going on and how they can share in the suddenly exploding pie.

"I never imagined Brazil really becoming such a strong country, especially how it has in the last 10 years," muses Carlos Jereissati, chief executive at Iguatemi, Brazil's largest chain of shopping centres. "Everyone is looking at us and saying: 'Wow, these people are really growing – they have the economy, they have the oil, they have the Olympics and the World Cup, we need to pay attention!'"

No one knows this better than Mr Jereissati who travels to London, New York, Paris and Milan to lure new luxury brands to his malls. Diane von Furstenberg, the fashion designer, recently opened her first Brazil outlet in Iguatemi's flagship mall in Sao Paulo. She says it has been the best opening in her company's history, selling "over a million dollars in its first six weeks of business". The boom means Mr Jereissati is ready to expand and quickly. "While it took us 20 years to do eight malls, we are probably going to do twice that in the next five years – we have a lot of money to do things." That is thanks largely to the expansion of the middle classes and their growing spending power.

And the ball just keeps rolling. The day we meet, Mr Jereissati, whose uncle is a senator in the party of José Serra and whose brother runs Oi, Brazil's biggest landline telephone company, is getting ready to entertain the bosses from the leather goods purveyor, Goyard, from Paris. And this Monday he was to play host to François-Henri Pinault, whose group includes Gucci, Christie's and Yves Saint Laurent (and whose wife is Salma Hayek). "In the past, maybe the second or third level of the company would come to see what opportunities are here. Now it's the main man who comes," Mr Jereissati notes.
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While Brazil remains, according to the World Bank, one the worst countries for the gap between the rich and poor, the income divide has begun to close in the nearly eight years of President Lula. True the favelas, running with sewage, guns and drugs, remain a feature of the urban landscape, especially in Rio de Janeiro where more than just cosmetic surgery will be required before the 2016 Games. But the number living in poverty has fallen during his two terms from about 50 million to 30 million. Studies meanwhile point to slightly more than half of all Brazilians now belonging to a socio-economic group broadly described as lower middle class. They will not visit Gucci in Mr Jereissati's malls, but they will go to the less flashy retailers like C&A or Topshop when it makes its debut in Brazil next year.

Brazil has been lucky, both finding its reserves of oil and in its partnership with China, which has helped considerably to drag it into greater prosperity. (Were China to trip, Brazil may fall hard.) President Lula also inherited an economy that, after the catastrophe of hyper-inflation in the early 1990s, had already been transformed by the policies of his predecessor. But, even his detractors agree that despite his past as a leftist union organiser, he has shown an unexpectedly steady hand guiding the economy and that his welfare policies have been crucial in ensuring that Brazil's rising tide has lifted most, if not all, boats.

That is not to say Brazil is set for good. Some economists worry of bubble conditions forming and warn especially about gushing capital flows into the country and the ceaseless upward movement of the currency. It's not just that dinners in Sao Paulo now cost as much or more than in Manhattan. The supercharging of the real also threatens to stunt any move in Brazil away from a commodities economy to a manufacturing one because as an exporter it is becoming ever less competitive.
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Now on a tour of African states, President Lula was asked whether he was campaigning to be the next Secretary General of the United Nations. It was just his style to reply that he had no interest because the job is for a "bureaucrat" and he, essentially, is above it. Both Brazil and President Lula are occasionally accused of hubris and it is easy to see why. Perhaps it is for the best then that when he attends the closing ceremonies of the World Cup in South Africa on Sunday, it won't be Brazil that goes home with the trophy. That would surely have made both daddy and child beyond smug, even insufferable.

Edições de:
- Brasil vive período de "milagres econômicos", diz o jornal britânico The Independent
-On top of the world: Why Brazil is booming

Editado e enviado por MVMeireles