[skuzye]

Speaking as a Brazilian - the country is an odd one. If you go by GDP it should be a rich country but it just isn't.

It's rightly classified as an emergent country. It has deep social and poverty problems that needs addressing even though it's a regional economic force.

Brazil is definitely capitalist but it's hard to do business there - 144th place in economic freedom index.

[f00zz]

> If you go by GDP it should be a rich country

Not really. GDP is large, but that's only because the population is large. Per capita GDP is around US$ 9k, which makes us poorer than Mexico or Argentina. For comparison, per capita GDP in Sweden is something like US$ 54k.

I remember being taught in school that Brazil is the n-th richest country in the world, and if only that wealth were evenly distributed we could all enjoy a welfare state like in Europe. That is simply not possible. But I guess many people here still believe it because the country has a few highly visible pockets of wealth.

[pedrocr]

Comparing to Sweden is a bit extreme. Portugal's comparable GDP is 24k. It's still a factor of 3x but a lot of the costs in a welfare state scale with the wealth of the economy as they are just directly cost of labor. Having a reasonable welfare state, that's not world-class but isn't the US either, should be possible.

[Synaesthesia]

Brazil should be wealthy. It has every advantage, huge amount of resources, no natural enemies ...