Published April 2006

Order here: publisher website

Dr. Vinod Thomas, Country Director for Brazil from 2001-2005, offers a candid and unique perspective on development in a land of contrasts. Brazil’s diversity and wealth of resources are a potential source for rapid and sustained development. But turning them into a foundation for welfare gains for the people hinges on socio-economic and political reforms.

Thomas shows that the country has among the best prospects among the large developing economies (such as China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Russia, South Africa), based on the potential for building on its human, natural, and institutional strengths. Realizing this potential, however, requires strong and urgent actions by the government and society in a second phase of reforms. These reforms must go beyond the focus on quantity, such as the size of the government’s primary surplus, to a focus on quality, such as the composition of public expenditures.

This agenda is ambitious, in that it covers a number of areas such as the quality of government expenditures, the quality of education or environmental sustainability. The need for such a second phase of reforms is analogous to the situation in other middle income countries, such as Mexico or Thailand. But the agenda is also pragmatic, as progress in one area can feed progress in others in a virtuous cycle.

The book offers lessons from Brazil’s achievements and challenges with a global perspective and with relevance for other countries. Among the striking achievements is the country’s progress in cutting inflation in half in the 1990s and stabilizing the economy in the past decade. The country also achieved one of the fastest expansions in basic education over the past 15 years. During that time, the country also reversed the earlier projection for a rise in the incidence of HIV/AIDS.

But Brazil lags behind many middle-income countries in secondary education enrollment and completion rates. The country suffers from ecological problems of water management and a high and rising rate of deforestation. Basic infrastructure and, regulatory reform for infrastructure and energy investment remain bottlenecks to growth. Political reform has also been a priority following allegations of related to election campaign funding and government contracts, and other topics.

With these issues in mind, the book offers a Brazilian agenda for action during 2005-2020, covering socio-economic and political areas.


Portuguese edition available here.