Tyler Cowen, Columnist

Brazil Is Still the Country of the Future

For all its troubles and contradictions, it can't be written off.

August 11, 2016 at 11:00 AM UTC

Corrected

August 11, 2016 at 2:46 PM UTC

Tyler Cowen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of economics at George Mason University and host of the Marginal Revolution blog.

A blessing and a curse.
Photographer: Mario Tama/Getty Images

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Brazil, it is often and not quite fairly said, is the country of the future and always will be. As the Olympics focuses global attention on the country, it's worth exploring the various ways in which this maxim is -- and may not be -- true.

The puzzle with Brazil is neither its successes nor its failures, but rather the combination of the two. The country has such a dynamic feel, and in the postwar era it saw many years of double-digit economic growth. The Economist featured the country on its cover in 2009 as the next miracle take-off, and in 2012 Germany's Der Spiegel published a long article titled “How Good Governance Made Brazil a Model Nation.”