Brazil economy minister argues for privatization plans
Brazilian Economy Minister Paulo Guedes once again advocated the privatization of companies run by the government at federal level. During a lecture at the National Economic and Social Development Bank (BNDES) on privatization efforts in the electric sector, Guedes said state-controlled firms will not be used “in an equivocal way to do politics.”
“The old politics is dead. State-run companies will no longer feed an equivocal way of doing politics, this excessive spending by the government that has corrupted democracy and brought economic growth to a halt. Even politicians have noticed this mistake,” he stated.
Guedes said that privatizing Eletrobras’s distributors, as was done last year, should serve as a model for coming privatization plans in Brazil. He noted he had originally the privatization of all government-controlled companies, but added that Jair Bolsonaro and the military favor keeping some of them as they are.
Pension reform
The minister also expressed for the overhaul in the country’s pensions system, another major item on the government’s agenda. “If we consider s today, the main expenditure [of the government] is the pension system. They’ve broken our already doomed pension system. It had shown signs of collapse even before Brazil grew old. So a reform proves necessary.”
The government, Guedes went on to say, has spent too much on the pension system, “which is about to break, promotes privileges, and takes income from the poor to give to those who have more.” The minister criticized the way Brazil deals with the public debt, which he described as the second biggest expenditure and could be enough to rebuild the whole of Europe in one year.
As the third largest expenditure by the federal government, Guedes named the its very apparatus. “Inside this apparatus, a number of state-run companies that no longer have investment capacity, are financially broken, generates debt, sometimes nests of corruption, and politically motivated appointments. There’s no investment and it doesn’t allow anyone to invest,” he argued.
*Jéssica Antunes contributed to this article.
