周刊遠比書更能報導某國的起伏。
In the past few years Brazil’s economy has disappointed. It grew by just 1.2% a year, on average in 2011-14, a slower rate of growth than most of its neighbours, let alone in places like China or India. Last year GDP barely grew at all (and may have fallen). It will almost certainly contract in 2015 http://econ.st/1w3kuLm
The Economist covers the rise and fall of a great nation
In the past few years Brazil’s economy has disappointed. It grew by just 1.2% a year, on average in 2011-14, a slower rate of growth than most of its neighbours, let alone in places like China or India. Last year GDP barely grew at all (and may have fallen). It will almost certainly contract in 2015 http://econ.st/1w3kuLm
In 1974 Edmar Bacha, an economist, described Brazil's economy as “Belindia”, a Belgium-sized island of prosperity in a sea of India-like poverty. Since then Brazil has done far better than India in alleviating poverty, but in business terms it still has a Belindia problem: a handful of world-class enterprises in a sea of poorly run ones. One big reason: poor management http://econ.st/1zElNeV
When Brazil’s national soccer team lost to Germany, it lost something much larger than a game. #WorldCup
In Brazil, World Cup Loss to Germany Looms Large
When Brazil lost to Germany, 7-1, on Tuesday, it lost something much larger than a game in a country where pride over five previous World Cup championships is forged into the national identity.
NYTIMES.COM|由 SIMON ROMERO AND SETH KUGEL 上傳
Brazil, a Nation Left in Despair
By JERÉ LONGMAN
Playing without Neymar and Thiago Silva, Brazil collapsed against a rampaging Germany in Tuesday’s World Cup semifinal, sending the entire country into a funk.
2014.4.13
Grand Visions Fizzle in Brazil
An array of lavish projects conceived when economic growth was surging now stand abandoned, stalled or wildly over budget, visible symbols of waste and mismanagement.
This week's cover previews:
Worldwide ex Latin America and Asia: The new face of terror
Latin America and Asia: Has Brazil blown it?
September 28th – October 4th 2013
In conjunction with this week's special report on Brazil, our Sao Paulo correspondent and author of the report will be hosting a live discussion about the country tomorrow from 11am New York / 4pm London time. For more information view: http://econ.st/173UhgJ
Has Brazil blown it? Having come tantalisingly close to taking off, the country has stalled. This week's special report explains what it must do to get airborne again. Today, from 4pm BST / 11am EDT, our Brazil correspondent and author of the report, Helen Joyce, will discuss the country in a live conversation via Twitter. Pose questions by commenting below or send a tweet including #askeconomist. For more information visit http://econ.st/1eMj5yt
WORLD
Video: Brazil's Humor Guerrillas
Few start-ups in Brazil have had success like Porta dos Fundos, a
comedy troupe whose YouTube channel is the country's most popular.
Related Article In recent weeks hundreds of thousands of Brazilians have been demonstrating against corrupt politicians and expensive football stadiums. What was their goal?
They are simply unhappy with their country because of its extreme social injustice. Forty-three percent of the country's income is controlled by 5,000 Brazilian families. Even the Workers Party PT has reached its limits. It has the option of changing and renewing its relationship to the social movements, or of turning into a party like any other which is only after power and allows itself to become corrupt.
The Brazilian middle class do not seem enthusiastic about the social programs of the government. Do they feel neglected?
During Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's presidency the rich became richer but the poor were also taken out of poverty. It was a win-win situation. The Workers Party PT has been redistributing the wealth. Redistribution means taking from the well-off and supporting the poorer classes of the population with the proceeds. But in this case, this principle was not applied to those with the largest wealth: the government has taken the money from the middle-class who have lost income thereby.
Will the Brazilian politicians listen to the pope's words politely at World Youth Day and then forget them?
This pope's style is very important for Latin America. He puts poor people and social justice first. This will strengthen the new democracies which were created from the resistance to military dictatorship and have adopted successful social policies. The pope has an important political role. He can move masses. There is not one politician - not even Obama - who can bring more than a million people together.
Protests in Brazil
The streets erupt
All that changed on June 13th when the state’s unaccountable, ill-trained and brutal military police turned a mostly peaceful demonstration into a terrifying rout. Dozens of videos, some from journalists, others from participants and bystanders, show officers with their name tags removed firing stun grenades and rubber bullets indiscriminately at fleeing protesters and bystanders and hunting stragglers through the streets. Motorists trapped in the mayhem ended up breathing pepper spray and tear gas. Demonstrators found with vinegar (which can be used to lessen the effect of tear gas) were arrested. Several journalists were injured, two shot in the face with rubber bullets at close range. One has been told he is likely to lose his sight in one eye. The following day’s editorials took a markedly different tone.
By June 17th what has become dubbed the “V for Vinegar” movement or “Salad Revolution” had spread to a dozen state capitals as well as the federal capital, Brasília. The aims had also grown more diffuse, with marchers demanding less corruption, better public services and control of inflation. Many banners protested against the disgraceful cost of the stadiums being built for next year’s football World Cup. Brazil has already spent 7 billion reais, three times South Africa’s total four years earlier, and only half the stadiums are finished. “First-world stadiums; third-world schools and hospitals”, ran one placard.
The marchers too were more diverse. An estimated 65,000 participated in São Paulo, with many more women, families and middle-aged folk than at previous protests. The state security-chief, Fernando Grella Vieira, met organisers earlier in the day and agreed a route; he gave the military police orders not to use rubber bullets and to stand by unless the protest turned violent. The result was a mostly peaceful, even joyous event.
Most marches in other cities passed off without serious violence too, though in Rio de Janeiro protesters and police clashed outside the Maracanã stadium, refurbished at a cost of over 1 billion reais for the World Cup—just six years after its last pricey rebuild. It was no coincidence that violence broke out in Rio, whose police are trigger-happy and corrupt even by Brazilian standards. In Brasília a group of demonstrators managed to scale the roof of Congress, but the police there reacted with restraint.
Similar escalations after seemingly minor flash points in recent years in Britain, France, Sweden and Turkey have appeared to be linked to some or all of the following features: government repression, high youth-unemployment, racial conflict, falling living standards and anger over immigration. Brazil is a different story. Its democracy is stable. Youth unemployment is at a record low. Brazilian racism is an internalised reality, not a daily street battle—and anyway, most of the marchers were white. The past decade has seen the most marked sustained rise in living standards in the country’s history. As for immigrants, though Brazil was built by them it now has hardly any. Only 0.5% of the population was born abroad.
None of this is to say that Brazilians have nothing to complain about: they pay the highest taxes of any country outside the developed world (36% of GDP) and get appalling public services in return. Violent crime is endemic; crack cocaine is sold and consumed openly in every big city centre. A minimum-wage worker in São Paulo’s centre whose employer does not cover transport costs (an obligation for formal employees) will spend a fifth of gross pay to spend hours a day on hot, overcrowded buses that trundle in from the city’s periphery. But this is nothing new in a country of gaping inequality—and in fact economic growth in the past decade has brought the biggest gains to those at the bottom of the heap.
So, why now? One reason is surely a recent spike in inflation, which is starting to eat into the buying power of the great majority of Brazilians who are still getting by on modest incomes, just as a big ramp-up in consumer credit in recent years has left them painfully overstretched. Bus fares have not risen for 30 months (mayors routinely freeze fares in municipal-election years, such as 2012, and in January this year the mayors of Rio and São Paulo agreed to wait until June before hiking in order to help the federal government massage the inflation figures). In fact, the rise in São Paulo’s and Rio’s bus fares comes nowhere close to matching inflation over that 30-month period. But bus fares are under government control, unlike other fast-rising costs such as those for housing and food. Perhaps they were simply chosen as a scapegoat.
More broadly, the very middle class that Brazil has created in the past decade—40m people have escaped from absolute poverty, but are still only one paycheck from falling back into it, and 2009 was the first year in which more than half the population could be considered middle class—is developing an entirely new relationship with the government. They see further improvements in their living standards as their right and will fight tooth and nail not to fall back into poverty. And rather than being grateful for the occasional crumb thrown from rich Brazilians’ tables, they are waking up to the fact that they pay taxes and deserve something in return. Perhaps their government’s triumphalism over those shiny new stadiums was the final straw.
Correction: we wrongly said above that Brazil had so far spent 3.3 billion reais on its World Cup stadiums. The correct figure is 7 billion reais ($3.2 billion).
公交車票價引發巴西20年來最大規模反政府遊行
2013年06月19日
Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
周二,抗議者聚集在聖保羅集會,反對公車票價上漲。
巴西聖保羅——巴西當局如今被數年來面臨的最大挑戰所動搖,其領導人在周二做出和解姿態,試圖平息席捲該國城市的抗議活動。但示威者繼續和官方對抗,數以千計的人湧上街頭,宣洩他們對政治腐敗、高昂生活費用以及世界盃和奧運會帶來的巨額公共支出的憤怒。
巴西的混亂局面讓很多巴西人及巴西之外的人感到震驚,一波又一波的抗議者譴責他們的領導人把太多精力和資源用來為國際賽事修建體育場,以便塑造巴西的國際形象,與此同時,該國的教育和醫療保健等基本服務卻嚴重匱乏。
- 檢視大圖
Evaristo Sa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images巴西總統迪爾瑪·羅塞夫說,在周一晚上的抗議之後,巴西「在醒來後變得更強大」。
「我熱愛足球,但我們需要學校,」48歲的消防員埃瓦迪爾·卡多索(Evaldir Cardoso)說。他帶着7個月大的兒子參與了抗議。
示威活動最初始於人們對公車票價大增的憤怒,但和最近幾年的其他一些抗議運動一樣——比如突尼斯和埃及的抗議運動,以及時間最近的土耳其抗議運動——巴西的抗議很快演變為對政府更為廣泛的譴責。
數個城市的政治人物於周二做出讓步,宣稱他們會降低或考慮降低公車票價,到這時,示威活動已經轉變為更大規模的社會抗議,有些遊行者揮舞着橫幅,上面寫着像「人民已經覺醒」這樣的口號。
「巴西這片綠洲之前似乎一片祥和,但是,突然之間,我們就
開始重現開羅解放廣場的示威活動,這些示威活動如此突然,毫無預兆,也沒有減弱之勢,」《聖保羅頁報》(Folha de São
Paulo)的專欄作者埃利亞內·坎坦赫德(Eliane
Cantanhêde)說。「我們都大吃一驚。我們從天堂掉落,至少是掉到了地獄的邊境。巴西到底出了什麼問題?」
數千民眾聚集在聖保羅的大教堂,然後向市長辦公室挺進。一小群人砸開了市長辦公室的窗戶,試圖破窗而入,迫使警衛往後撤退。
在北茹阿澤魯,示威者把市長逼進某銀行內數小時,並要求對其進行彈劾,與此同時,另有數千民眾針對教師工資問題發起了抗議。在其他一些城市,示威者阻斷街道,闖入市政會議或打斷當地立法者的會議,搶過與會人員的話筒,大聲拍手,有時還戴着小丑鼻子。
此次抗議是該國1985年結束軍事獨裁統治以來規模最大的
異見宣示活動之一。在警方的嚴厲鎮壓使得抗議者的憤怒火上澆油之後,女總統迪爾瑪·羅塞夫(Dilma
Rousseff)試圖在周二通過讚揚抗議者的活動來安撫反對者。「這些聲音超越了傳統機制、政治派別和媒體,應該得到傾聽,」羅塞夫說。「昨天示威活動
的強烈程度證明了我國民主的活力。」羅塞夫當過游擊隊員,曾被獨裁政權囚禁,目前則成為了民眾尖銳批評的對象。
她的語氣與土耳其採取的立場形成了鮮明對比。在土耳其,類似的示威也始於一個看似孤立的問題:伊斯坦布爾一座城市公園的命運,但卻迅速升級為針對政府合法性的廣泛拒斥,抗議者是那些敢於大聲疾呼的民眾。
土耳其總理把示威者貶斥為恐怖分子、破壞者和「流氓」,與此相反,羅塞夫似乎敏銳地意識到,巴西廣泛的沮喪情緒,是源於該國的全球抱負和千百萬民眾現實生活之間的差異。
示威在巴西爆發之時,該國預言中的長期經濟繁榮似乎正走向終結。經濟已經放緩,變成了近年來經濟增長的一個蒼白陰影;通貨膨脹率高企,該國貨幣兌美元匯率大幅下跌。然而,巴西人的期望卻前所罕見地高,助長了對於腐敗、差勁的學校和其他政府失策的廣泛憤恨。
示威者的一個主要抱怨就是政府的腐敗,這一點在近期巴西最大的政治醜聞中得到了體現,隨之而來的審訊涉及了執政的工人黨(Workers Party)的一些高層人物。
在審訊中被判刑的官員都還沒有走進監獄,儘管按照起訴意見,在最高法院於11月宣判之後,這些人應當立刻開始服刑。
「我們對我們這些政治領導人的腐敗行為感到憤怒,」在聖保羅參加示威的35歲辦公室職員恩德森·多斯桑托斯(Enderson dos Santos)說。「我來在這裡,就是為了告訴我的孩子們,巴西已經覺醒。」
興建之中的一些用於明年世界盃的體育館,現在也因為工期拖
延和成本超支而遭到批評,淪為了嘲笑的對象。示威者們質疑,它們可能會成為華而不實的累贅。其中一個體育館位於亞馬遜地區最大的城市馬瑙斯,將有能力容納
4.3萬名觀眾,但在該市,去現場觀看職業足球比賽的球迷平均不到600人。
政府機構似乎準備繼續把公共資金投入這些項目。一份巴西報紙周二報道稱,該國開發銀行已經批准了一項2億美元的貸款,準備在聖保羅修建一座名為伊塔蓋龍(Itaquerão)的新體育場,用於舉辦世界盃的揭幕戰。
「先看看健康和教育方面的投資,再看看為舉辦世界盃而進行
的大筆投資,顯而易見,對比的結果會引發憤慨,」阿雷格里港天主教大學(Catholic
University)的社會學家阿道·克洛維斯·馬丁斯·多斯桑托斯(Adão Clóvis Martins dos Santos)說。
Paula Ramon自聖保羅、Taylor Barnes自里約熱內盧對本文有報道貢獻。翻譯:陶夢縈、林蒙克
Folk Opera
By IAN BURUMA
The novels "Sandalwood Death" and "Pow!," by Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan, combine literary imagination with a peasant spirit.
*****
巴西:下一個經濟強權Wirtschaftsmacht Brasilien
- 作者:亞歷山大.布許
- 原文作者:Alexander Busch
- 譯者:梁永安
- 出版社:立緒
- 出版日期:2012年
巴西打噴嚏,全世界都發燒
厚塊牛排和吃到飽的巧克力彰顯了這個國家的新財富,
當他們在全球啤酒市場攪起一池春水,
巴西,將不只在2016奧運大大亮相,你我生活中的巴西比重正逐步上升!一本巴西整體國力變動的傳記本書以類似新聞報導寫作的筆法,從巴西人日常生活的細節,觀察巴西整體社會經濟的變動,例如巴西人平均體重增加,源自牛排與甜食消費量暴增,可由此看出飲食消費方式的變化;同樣,鐵皮屋改建成高級公寓,也充分說明巴西的經濟榮景正直追傳統歐美強權。本書作者為德國《商業日報》長駐巴西20年的記者,書中隨手可得的報導式敘述,不僅賦予全書活潑生動的文字魅力,加上作者資深經濟記者的背景,擅長以各項經濟數據勾勒出真實的社會脈動,亦為全書提供堅實的論述基礎。作者並不想讓本書成為枯燥的經濟學讀物,而是一本巴西整體國力變動的傳記,涵蓋層面廣泛,是本集合許多故事片段而成的有趣著作,讀者可以看到巴西人企圖打進世界的啤酒市場;石油工業如何主導巴西經濟;各式綠色能源的開發;巴西的政治恐龍與民主變動;彷彿沒有明日的消費方式;國外投資客的角色;農金產業的競爭力;抗衡北美的國際關係;巴西雨林的未來等等,讓人可從不同角度切入巴西經濟體所面臨的各項問題。這是一本趣味橫生、關於巴西的讀物,亦是一份方便隨時參考的精彩報告,讀者可從自己最想瞭解的領域開始閱讀,前後往復,逐漸拼湊出整個巴西經濟的面貌,亦可按照作者的章節安排,從頭瞭解巴西經濟的變化與發展。對台灣讀者而言,本書絕對可以彌補我們對巴西,甚至南美洲的資訊漏洞,亦可從德國的角度瞭解國際社會的互動模式,突破台灣社會僅聚焦亞洲的觀點,是一本可以挑戰台灣國際尺度的出色讀物。作者簡介亞歷山大.布許(Alexander Busch)生於1963年,在委內瑞拉長大。大學時回到德國,就讀科隆新聞學院,在科隆、布宜諾斯艾利斯修讀經濟及政治學。他長住巴西20年,除了是《經濟周刊》(Wirtschaftswoche)、《商業日報》(Handelsblatt)和瑞士《金融與經濟週報》(Finanz und Wirtschaft)的駐外記者,他也在巴西的個人辦事處為投資者和企業提供當地投資建議。譯者簡介梁永安台灣大學文化人類學學士、哲學碩士,東海大學哲學博士班肄業。目前為專業翻譯者,共完成約近百本譯著,包括《文化與抵抗》(Culture and Resistance / Edward W. Said)、《啟蒙運動》(The Enlightenment / Peter Gay)、《現代主義》(Modernism:The Lure of Heresy / Peter Gay)等。
目錄
1 一個繼起的新強權:為什麼我們低估了巴西崛起的勁道?
2 穩定帶來的成果:經濟成長改變了這個國家
3 為全球經濟新角色做準備
4 巴西企業的強項
5 巴西成為全球的餵養者
6 來自里約熱內盧的一眾巨人:巴西石油、淡水河谷和BNDES等
7 綠色世界強權:巴西在生質燃料的領導角色
8 民主是巴西的部份優勢也是挑戰
9 為登上世界政治舞台做準備
10 巴西能否成為政治大國將取決於亞馬遜雨林
11 展望
附錄
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