Brazil’s OECD membership on the back burner - Cedê Silva (Brazilian Report)

 Essa adesão do Brasil à OCDE está atrasada há pelo menos três décadas, senão mais. Com o PT de volta ao poder, deve demorar pelo menos mais uma década, a menos que os companheiros abandonem suas restrições irracionais a esse “clube das boas práticas. O atraso não é tanto material, ou regulatório, e sim mental.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

https://brazilian.report/business/2023/01/20/oecd-membership-back-burner/

Brazil’s OECD membership on the back burner

Cedê Silva

Brazilian Report, Jan. 20, 2023

Brazil’s Finance Minister Fernando Haddad on Wednesday said that a “working group” within the government will study the terms of Brazil’s accession to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) before President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva takes any decision on the matter.

“We already have here a working group with [the Finance Ministry’s Secretary for International Affairs] Tatiana Rosito,” Mr. Haddad told reporters at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

“We need to design a policy […], the ministries will align themselves to the decision of the president,” he added.

It turns out no such working group formally exists.

As 'The Brazilian Report' showed, the new Lula administration has been coy about where it stands in regard to Brazil’s negotiations to join the OECD as a full member.

Joining the so-called “club of rich countries” has been a Brazilian goal since the country formally made an accession request in 2017, during the Michel Temer administration.

OECD membership is widely regarded as a stamp of approval that a country is in line with best governance practices. In Brazil, efforts to meet OECD rules are believed to have helped improve the transparency and performance of state-owned companies, for example.

In 2019, the Jair Bolsonaro administration created a group, led by the chief of staff’s office, in charge of coordinating Brazil’s entry to the organization. The group held 30 meetings and produced seven reports in four years, in an effort to show that the government was doing its homework in order to join the club.

However, upon taking office on January 1 this year, the Lula government created a new organogram for the chief of staff’s office, deleting any reference to the group.

The move was not exactly a surprise. Celso Amorim, Lula’s current top foreign policy advisor and his foreign minister during his previous two terms as president (2003-2010), has voiced his opposition to the OECD in different interviews, arguing that Brazil would not benefit that much from membership.

Back in December, while a member of the transition cabinet, Mr. Haddad had already said Lula was to “reconsider” whether Brazil would join.

The chief of staff’s press office told 'The Brazilian Report' that the question of Brazil’s accession will fall back to the Foreign Affairs Ministry, adding: “The consequences of this decision will be defined later.” The Foreign Affairs Ministry did not reply to our questions.

==A Bolsonaro-era project ==

Brazil’s tentative accession to the OECD was a major project of the Bolsonaro administration, in an effort to make the government appear forward-looking, advanced, and a champion of economic liberalism.

In his last speech at the United Nations General Assembly, in September 2022, then-President Bolsonaro said Brazil was “striding” towards joining the OECD — which was not exactly true. Although the OECD formally began accession discussions with Brazil in January of last year, Secretary-General Mathias Cormann had since said that member countries did not believe in Mr. Bolsonaro’s environmental commitments.

Later, a few weeks before the runoff election in October, five of Bolsonaro’s ministers held a presentation to the press in order to draw attention to the fact Brazil had delivered a memo to the organization — just one small paperwork step in the long road towards actually being ready to join. They did not reply to questions from reporters.

In addition to its negligence with regard to deforestation and environmental topics, the fight against corruption and money laundering was also an OECD concern with the Bolsonaro administration.

Back in 2019, a spokesman criticized a Supreme Court decision which blocked the investigation of suspicious wire transfers without previous court authorization — at the request of the lawyers of Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the former president’s eldest son. Later, the Supreme Court used a similar understanding to annul an inquiry against him.

One of the staunchest defenders of Brazil joining the OECD was Marcos Troyjo, who served as Foreign Trade Secretary under former Economy Minister Paulo Guedes. He argued Brazil would become institutionally stronger in its efforts to join, become more attractive to foreign investors, and build muscle to participate in future free trade agreements, which would be less about tariffs and quotas and more about regulations.

In 2020, Mr. Troyjo was elected president of the New Development Bank (NDB), also known as the “BRICS bank.” He did not reply to questions sent by The Brazilian Report.

Now, with no dedicated group in government to take responsibility for Brazil’s OECD accession bid, the country’s efforts to join will lose any priority they ever had.

Retired ambassador Paulo Roberto de Almeida told 'The Brazilian Report' that Brazil is “decades late” in the conversation about joining the OECD. On its official website, the organization says that Brazil is its “most engaged key partner and a source of valuable policy experience.”

“Even if a working group is created in the Foreign Affairs Ministry, it does not mean the topic will advance a lot,” Mr. Almeida says.

Joining the OECD requires reforms and adopting policies in different areas, and simply communicating with the organization’s staff in Paris will not be enough. President Lula appears in no rush to do either.