Brazilians have a habit of tacking do onto a word to signify its enormous size or importance.
Gordo, or fat, becomesgorddo, a really big fat person, or the 2005 corruption scheme of monthly payments to congressmen became dubbed the mensaldo. Brazil itself might be nicknamed Brazildo — a really big complicated country that is difficult to categorize and understand: in the famous words of Tom Jobim, Brazil is not for beginners.
There are multiple Brazils. One can find abject poverty in the largely rural North and Northwest and visitors can become lost in the maze of upscale shopping malls in the Southeast. It is extraordinarily rich in resources — a top global exporter of soya, iron ore, petroleum, and poultry. Yet it is also rather parochial and insular, often inwardly focused on domestic concerns. Like its iconic samba parade at Carnival, it is full of color and sound that may appear chaotic on the surface, but also has a discipline, rhythm, and creativity carrying it forward. Brazil is highly complex and multifaceted.
This chapter explores both the economic ideas and the economic policies of this tropical country with global ambitions. We begin by delving into some of the distinctly Brazilian cultural practices that shape business and policy-making. We then look back to how Brazil's economy evolved to respond to domestic and international pressures, and in relation to the various economic plans that were developed in order to improve it. Rather than a dismal foreshadowing in the joke “Brazil is a country of the future — and always will be,” we can see some causes for optimism in the structural changes in the Brazilian economy that have propelled it to become the eighth largest in the world (The World Factbook, 2013). But we close on a cautious note. If Brazil does not push deeply into a new round of reforms — largely in its micro-foundations — it may find its rise to the top of the league tables of global economic players to be short-lived.