BRAZIL-Interesting scenario data

This pretty much says it all

You don’t always need a pile of tables and data to draw a correct conclusion.

Sometimes a simple comparison is enough to tell you if things are good or bad.

A recent press editorial provided the following data as compiled by the IMF and the Brazilian Central Bank.

Over the past two decades the GDP of emerging and poor countries grew 190%.  Global GDP over the same period grew 110%, and Brazil’s GDP grew 70%.

The figures work out to an average annual rate of GDP growth over a 20-year period as follows:

• Emerging and Poor Countries: 5.5%
• World: 3.7%
• Brazil: 2.7%

Now, we can justify some of Brazil’s poor performance by remembering that at the outset of the 20-year period, (i.e. 1995), Brazil was in the midst of a plan to end a few centuries of chronic inflation, the creation of a new currency, and coming out of a decade of economic stagnation. 

Since I have not provided the data on a year-by-year basis we can’t establish which specific periods were the cause of the low rate of average growth. We can, of course, hypothesize that the past 5 years may have been responsible for bringing down the average.

What the data do tell us is that over a 20-year period, Brazil has been sliding backward relative to other countries in the global economy. That, alone, is sufficient to help us project the next few years.

With other emerging countries growing twice as fast as Brazil over a long period of time, catching up is going to require one helluva lot of work!

And it hasn’t started yet. Brazil is still in the throes of “taking out the trash” of years of kleptocratic management.

You might want to disaggregate the timeline with your management team so as to identify where things went wrong and why. During 13 of those 20 years, the PT has been in power. 

I don’t suppose we need to say more!