O que é este blog?

Este blog trata basicamente de ideias, se possível inteligentes, para pessoas inteligentes. Ele também se ocupa de ideias aplicadas à política, em especial à política econômica. Ele constitui uma tentativa de manter um pensamento crítico e independente sobre livros, sobre questões culturais em geral, focando numa discussão bem informada sobre temas de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil. Para meus livros e ensaios ver o website: www.pralmeida.org. Para a maior parte de meus textos, ver minha página na plataforma Academia.edu, link: https://itamaraty.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida.

Mostrando postagens com marcador Juan Forero. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador Juan Forero. Mostrar todas as postagens

segunda-feira, 16 de dezembro de 2013

Republica Federativa do BNDES: um banco maior que o Brasil - Juan Forero (WP)

A bank that may be too big for Brazil

By  

The Washington Post: December 14, 2013

RIO DE JANEIRO — To dodge the global economic crisis, Brazil cranked up its spending, expanding subway lines and shipyards for oil platforms while building hydroelectric dams and stadiums for soccer’s 2014 World Cup.
There would be no austerity as in Europe, Brazil’s leaders pointedly promised. And Brazil had a well-oiled machine to keep its economy humming: the state development bank, an institution little known outside this country but central to policymakers here.
The bank has loaned a third of a trillion dollars since 2010, twice the amount the World Bank provided to about 100 countries combined, with much of the bounty going to the mining, agriculture and construction giants that are pillars of Brazil’s economy.
Economists at BNDES, as the bank is known, say the benefits are felt evenly across Brazil: low unemployment and an economy that was kept on track while others seemed to careen out of control.
But the global downturn is finally being felt in Latin America’s largest economy. And critics say a big part of the problem is Brazil’s strategy of doling out loans worth billions of dollars from the bank to the country’s richest and most politically connected companies.
Economists and opposition leaders say this focus on Brazil’s “national champions” neglects smaller, nimbler firms that are developing new technologies and products to diversify a commodity-dependent economy. They also say that BNDES’s huge loans are fueling inflation that the Central Bank of Brazil must scramble to control.
Sergio Lazzarini, who works at the Insper business school in São Paulo and writes about BNDES, said the bank’s role has become more difficult to justify in the face of an economy completing its third year of disappointing growth.
“Despite these trends,” Lazzarini said, “the bank has become more aggressive, bigger, with more direct transfers from the government to the bank,” a reference to the treasury funds and payroll tax revenue used for loans.
At the bank’s fortresslike offices in bustling downtown Rio, executives and economists speak proudly of a 61-year-old institution that has backed companies in the past decade whose growth helped make Brazil the world’s seventh-largest economy.
João Ferraz, BNDES’s vice president, called such projects central to an economy that posted solid growth in the 2000s, capped by a blistering 7.5 percent expansion in 2010.
“Can you build a hydroelectric plant with small firms? Can you build a pulp plant or a car factory with small firms?” Ferraz said.
In approving loans, the bank considers the quality of the companies and the benefits of the projects, he said, calling critics misguided in accusing BNDES of cronyism. He spoke about one well-known recipient of BNDES loans, the construction giant Odebrecht, which has 175,000 employees in 26 countries and built BNDES’s modernist high-rise headquarters.
“I am not friends with Odebrecht,” he said of the São Paulo-based conglomerate. “I am friends with the good projects of Odebrecht.”
But Adriano Pires, a prominent government detractor and director of a consulting firm specializing in energy, said the bank’s disbursements — $81 billion this year, its biggest outlay ever — are generating worrisome levels of debt and an outsize role for the state in the economy.
“What is the policy behind this?” Pires said. “It’s an ideology that holds that the state has to have a strong role in the economy.”
Indeed, in exchange for loans, BNDES has acquired a minority stake in dozens of private companies, giving the bank’s executives a say in their operations.
The bank also remains opaque about how it chooses which companies to shower with loans, said João Lopes Pinto, coordinator of the group More Democracy, which has met with bank officials to lobby for more transparency.
Bank executives say they are working to be more forthcoming, although they say regulations prevent them from providing details about loans.
A boon for big borrowers
With disbursements having gone up by a factor of five over the past decade, Pinto said, there has been more of a windfall for big borrowers such as the São Paulo-based meatpacker JBS.
A decade ago, JBS wasn’t even among Brazil’s top 400 companies. But BNDES provided $4.4 billion from 2008 to 2010, essential as the company went abroad to acquire Swift, National Beef, Smithfield Beef and Pilgrim’s Pride. That made JBS a worldwide leader in beef production.
In 2010, JBS was also the largest contributor to President Dilma Rousseff’s campaign, donating $4.7 million, according to a report on BNDES and Brazil’s economy by Mansueto Almeida, an economist at the government-funded Institute of Applied Economic Research. He questions what Brazil has gotten out of supporting the company in its heavy expansion into the U.S. market.
“I don’t see any kind of social outcome or social return that would justify BNDES in promoting this firm,” Almeida said. JBS declined to comment.
Almeida said the problem is that BNDES often acts as an investment bank, not a public institution focused on fostering social development.
In contrast, Almeida said, fast-developing South Korea boosted dynamic companies that developed electronics, among them Samsung.
“In Brazil, we don’t do that,” Almeida said. “We give you subsidized credit so you can do the same thing or go overseas and buy your competitors.”
Ferraz, the BNDES vice president, said such assertions overlook an increasingly diverse portfolio. He said the bank is focusing more on companies with gross revenues of $40 million or less, in categories the bank calls micro, small or medium-size. In 2009, 21 percent of loans went to those companies; this year, 37 percent has been provided to them, according to bank documents.
The bank is also accelerating spending on projects that economists say the country desperately needs, such as energy generation plants, highways, ports, airports and other infrastructure that “will be a big driver of economic growth,” said Nelson Siffert, BNDES’s superintendent for infrastructure.
Still, the bank’s relationship with giant companies and well-connected billionaires has created problems for its executives and government.
Although BNDES was not explicitly one of their targets, protesters who staged huge nationwide rallies in June directed much of their ire at government policies they said benefit the elite in a country of grinding income inequality.
One was would-be oil baron Eike Batista, a flamboyant billionaire whose EBX Group received more than $4 billion in loans, prompting him to call BNDES “the best bank in the world.” But now his empire is collapsing, and opposition leaders are questioning BNDES over its support of his money-losing companies.
“The money cannot go to a few lucky ones,” said César Colnago, an opposition lawmaker in Congress.
Batista’s office did not return calls seeking comment.
Dependent on BNDES
To be sure, credit is expensive in Brazil and BNDES fills that need, particularly the huge loans needed by companies such as the state-controlled Petrobras oil giant and Vale, a mining company that has $5 billion in outstanding loans from the bank.
Vale has grown into a $46 billion company employing tens of thousands of workers.
Sonia Zagury, global head of finance at Vale, said BNDES’s role “in the Brazilian economy is an important one, and they are an important partner for Vale.”
But analysts say there is another downside to BNDES’s big spending: It fans inflation, which has remained stubbornly high at just under 6 percent a year.
To keep it under control, the Central Bank on Nov. 27 raised its benchmark rate to 10 percent. Such a high interest rate — the highest of any developed country — is believed to crowd out the development of private lenders.
That leaves companies perpetually dependent on BNDES and its cheaper loans, according to Almeida, the economist.
“No bank, no matter how smart it is, can compete with a bank that receives subsides from the government,” he said.

Reporting for this article was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

sábado, 2 de fevereiro de 2013

Integracao sul-americana (da droga) - tem tarifa comum para o produto? - Juan Forero (NPR)

Confesso não saber se a branquinha, a cocaina -- em pó, pasta base ou qualquer outra forma -- tem uma classificação aduaneira, ou seja, os 9 ou 10 dígitos do Sistema Harmonizado da Aladi que serve para classificar os milhares de itens que entram na pauta aduaneira de comércio exterior de um país, no caso, os nossos países, o Brasil e seus simpáticos vizinhos, que devem estar ganhando uma grana preta com a droga branca.
Em todo caso, apreciaria que alguém me dissesse qual a Nomenclatura Aduaneira do Mercosul que classifica a droga, uma vez que ela pode, teoricamente, ser exportada legalmente, para fins de pesquisa ou para uso médico, por exemplo. E qual seria a tarifa aplicada, por favor, se está em lista de exceção, se está prevista convergência em algum momento (no livre comércio total que um dia deve existir, caramba, inclusive com a legalização dessa importante commodity do comércio mundial).
Enquanto isso, ela continua a provocar destruição, morte, corrupção, tangos e tragédias neste nosso canto de planeta que alguns pretendem integrado. Também acho, mas não sempre pelas vias corretas.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Brazilian federal police patrol the Mamore River, which separates Brazil from Bolivia. The river is used by traffickers to ferry cocaine from Bolivia into Brazil, where cocaine consumption is rising rapidly.
Juan Forero/Getty Images
As cocaine consumption falls in the United States, South American drug traffickers have begun to pioneer a new soft target for their product: big and increasingly affluent Brazil.
And the source of the cocaine is increasingly Bolivia, a landlocked country that shares a 2,100-mile border with Brazil.
As Brazilian police officers and border agents can attest, the drug often finds its way to Brazil by crossing the Mamore River, which separates the state of Rondonia from Bolivia in the heart of South America.
It is not an easy border to patrol. Much of it is porous jungle or river. It is also a big border, bigger than the U.S.-Mexico line that has caused so much trouble for both the Obama administration and Mexico's government.
Worse still is that Bolivia, along with Peru and Colombia, are the three biggest cocaine-producing countries — and Brazil shares 5,000 miles of frontier with them.
An agent of Brazil's Forca Nacional, an agency made up of military policemen, stands guard in a largely abandoned border hamlet that is used by drug traffickers to ferry cocaine from neighboring Bolivia.
Juan Forero/NPR
A perfect route for the transport of cocaine is the Mamore River, which meanders northward from Bolivia into the heart of Brazil's Amazon. So say the Brazilian cops who use a speedboat to patrol the wide, slow-moving Mamore near the Brazilian border town of Guajara-Mirim.
"Here we patrol at dawn and at night, looking to ambush the boats that cross with drugs," says Alexandre Nascimento, a federal police agent who piloted the boat. "But it's difficult and dangerous, and you have to have patience."
The agents also say they have to have a degree of luck, to decipher which of the countless small boats that cross the river from Bolivia are carrying drugs.
Most don't stop at the major border crossings, but rather find their way along narrow channels and drop off their goods at isolated ports.
"There are many ports," says Alexandre Barbosa, another federal agent. "Every 100 meters or sometimes less, you see a port. So you can move from one port to the other very fast."
Brazilian and U.N. counternarcotics officials say those little boats making quick trips, along with small planes that make 20-minute flights, are flooding Brazil with Bolivian cocaine.
As Brazil Grows Richer, Cocaine Use Rises
The reasons are simple: Brazil, long the world's No. 2 consumer of cocaine after the United States, is seeing consumption rise fast. And Bolivia is responding to the demand, increasing its production of cocaine in recent years, according to U.N. and U.S. data.
"You've seen a shift where the drug traffickers are looking for a new market, new and emerging markets," says Bo Mathiasen, a senior U.N. drug official who tracks the cocaine trade across the continent. "And so the traffickers have been focusing on trying to ship more cocaine over towards Brazil, to Argentina and down to Chile."
It is Brazil, though, that is the big prize out of the many countries that have seen a spike in cocaine use in recent years. Brazil has lifted 30 million people into the middle class in recent years. For traffickers, that's particularly alluring, Mathiasen says.
"Brazil is in a way victim of its own success," he says. "Clearly, the economic success and the rising purchasing power and the growth of the economy turned it more attractive also for drug trafficking."
The turn toward Brazil has come as cocaine use in the United States has fallen by an estimated two-thirds over the past 30 years, according to the United Nations 2012 World Drug Report, which says the trend has been particularly notable since 2006.
Meanwhile, Colombia, which has historically supplied cocaine to the U.S., has seen the amount of land dedicated to drug crops reduced by half since 2001.
Cocaine production has also fallen steeply.
Increased Production In Peru And Bolivia
Peru and Bolivia have picked up the slack, with the cocaine from Bolivia proving to be the biggest challenge, according to Brazilian police.
"We see this as a problem of security and, at times, a problem of national defense," says Regina Miki, national secretary of public security at Brazil's Ministry of Justice.
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff's government has since 2011 moved to shore up border security by deploying thousands of troops and assigning more and better equipped federal police agents to the border.
There are also plans for a fleet of unmanned aerial drones to patrol the most remote sectors. In a recent hearing in the capital, Brasilia, Justice Minister Jose Eduardo Cardozo said Brazil moved fast and aggressively.
"It's impossible to have a border that's invulnerable, because no country in the world has that," he said. "But our frontiers are much better controlled than in the past."
But out on Brazil's frontier with Bolivia, the Mamore River, it's clear how difficult the challenge is for a group of 35 federal agents assigned to patrol just one sector.
On a recent day, heavy rains fell and the Mamore and other rivers became swollen. Meanwhile, the small dugout canoes from Bolivia kept coming, loaded with provisions and suitcases, boxes and equipment.
In their speedboat, the federal officers dashed from one side of the Mamore to the other, trying to decide which boats to stop and search. With the river running high, they also had another problem to worry about: small creeks that had been made navigable by the constant rainfall.
"Look, even here, in front of us, you can see a canal," says Allan Oliveira, one of the agents. "You can go in with the small boats traffickers use to hide from the police."