Writing about the Brazil of a century ago, Warren Dean, an economic historian, noted that the country's foreign trade "appears to have been limited to commodities in which overwhelming comparative advantage offset high costs of production and commercialisation and high internal taxes." Both government and private sector paid "little attention to...competitiveness," he added. Those words ring uncannily true of the Brazil of recent years. For much of the past decade the country enjoyed faster growth because of China's demand for its iron ore, soya beans and oil, and because higher wages and newly available credit boosted the purchasing power of tens of millions of Brazilians. But now the economy has stalled.
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