The number of people living in poverty in Brazil grew by two million last year in the wake of the country's worst recession on record, according to the government statistics bureau.
The collapse of civilization and extinction of much of the natural world is “on the horizon” due to climate change, Sir David Attenborough declared at the opening day UN climate talks in Poland.
Joaquim Levy, managing director and World Bank chief financial officer, has been tapped to be the next president of Brazil’s national economic and social development bank BNDES, news advanced to a column in daily O Estado de S. Paulo published on Sunday.
Right-wing President-elect Jair Bolsonaro vowed in a tweet on Thursday to investigate Brazil’s state-run national development bank, BNDES, for corruption by opening its “black box” of secret transactions. BNDES is the largest development lender in the Americas with a loan book larger than the World Bank’s.
The World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank are providing Argentina with three loans totaling more than US$1.8 billion, aiming to help the country cope with financial difficulties and support citizens most at risk.
After getting out of its most severe recession in history in 2017, Brazil remains in a state of economic malaise, notching up a mere 1% of growth last year, with public debt forecast to snowball from 77% of GDP to 140% by 2030, according to the World Bank.
The World Bank Group unveiled a new system on Thursday to rank countries based on their success in developing human capital, an effort to prod governments to invest more effectively in education and healthcare.
Whoever wins Brazil’s presidential election on October 7, and the runoff on October 28, will have to convince markets, implement austerity measures while trying to drag millions people out of poverty.
Argentina is looking to expand an existing currency swap arrangement with China, as Buenos Aires looks to stabilize the economy one month after applying for financial aid from the International Monetary Fund. In an interview with the Financial Times, Argentina’s Chief of Cabinet Marcos Peña, said “we have an active swap with China that the previous government left us and we will try to make it bigger.”
The Argentine Congress passed the government's capital markets reform bill on Wednesday, seeking to boost a troubled economy by reducing the power of market regulators and loosening restrictions on some funds investing in Argentina. Investors and economists consider the reform bill key to President Mauricio Macri's effort to boost investment in the country, whose capital markets are far smaller than regional peers.