Brazil announces $64bn infrastructure project
The president of Brazil Dilma Rousseff has announced new tax concessions that she hopes will bring in R$198 ($64bn) of investment into road, railways, ports and airports.
Rousseff made the announcement on 9 June.
She also said that R$69bn of private investment are expected to come in by 2018 – the end of her second term in office.
Under the package, Brazil will offer concessions worth around R$66bn for roads to connect soya bean growers of the interior to ports, R$86bn for railways, R$37bn for ports and almost R$9bn for airports, including for the cities of Salvador, Florianópolis, Fortaleza and Porto Alegre.
The government will also seek to cut subsidised credit by promoting schemes to encourage winners of the infrastructure concessions to issue domestic bonds.
The plan, equivalent to about 3.5% of gross domestic product, comes as Brazil’s economy is moving towards recession: industry is contracting and the construction sector is reeling from a corruption scandal at state-owned oil company Petrobras, the country’s biggest corporate investor.
The World Economic Forum ranks Brazil 120th out 144 countries for the quality of its infrastructure.
But at the launch of the plan in Sao Paolo, Rousseff said the concessions will be key to boosting living standards, income and employment.
The project, she added, will be the “start of a better future”
Rousseff’s announcement comes three years after she tried a similar scheme: the government sought R$210bn in private-sector investment through concessions in 2012 but only managed to raise a fifth of that amount.
About Winnie Agbonlahor
Winnie is news editor of Global Government Forum. She previously reported for Civil Service World - the trade magazine for senior UK government officials. Originally from Germany, Winnie first came to the UK in 2006 to study a BA in Journalism & Russian at the University of Sheffield. She is bilingual in English and German, and, after spending an academic year abroad in Russia and reporting for the Moscow Times, Winnie also speaks Russian fluently.
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