An Analysis of Brazil's Economy and Finance

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Introduction

Brazil with a population around 201,032,714, is the largest South America’s country. Brazil’s most important components of its GDP are service revenues, wide industry sector and its successful agriculture.

For More than two decades Brazil suffered badly from high inflation, economic decline, domestic and foreign debt. In 1993, country’s Inflation reached 30 percent a month and as a result the country wouldn’t sustain growth. After many unsuccessful plans to control the inflation, finally Real Plan of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, minister of finance, worked out and brought the inflation down to a single digit.

Today, Brazil with a GDP of $2.533 trillion is the 7th largest economy in the world and it is also considered as one of the most successful emerging countries. Despite all predictions, thanks to its huge domestic market and agriculture, the country maintained its growth in 2009 and 2010.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how Brazil, a country with an extremely high rate of inflation and low growth, positioned itself as the 7th largest economy of the world and what are the challenges that the country is facing. First of all, the Real Plan of Fernando Henrique Cardoso and how it helped the country to stabilize its economy and drop down the inflation rate will be discussed. Secondly, how his successor’s policies, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, improved country’s economy. At the end the challenges that Dilma Vana Rousseff, the current president, is facing will be discussed.

In early 1994, Fernando Henrique Cardoso was selected as minister of finance, his primary objective was to develop a new stabilization plan. The plan named Real Plan and it focused mainly on the causes of inflation in country. Th...

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