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Brazil's finance minister expresses optimism about economy

Xinhua, September 3, 2016 Adjust font size:

Brazilian Finance Minister Henrique Meirelles said Friday that the country's economy would grow by 2.5 percent in 2018 and would keep the momentum due to the reforms being implemented by the government of the new President Michel Temer.

Speaking at a Brazil-China business seminar in Shanghai, Meirelles said the structural reforms would bring annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth to over 4 percent a year, according to a statement from Brasilia.

Meirelles said Brazil's economy would grow by 1.6 percent in 2017 and 2.5 percent in 2018, added that this was not enough.

"The historic trend of Brazil's potential is to have substantially higher rates. We will work to bring about fundamental reforms so that Brazil can return to having growth rates of over 4 percent, as it had in the past," said Meirelles, according to the statement.

In his presentation, the minister showed the Chinese audience that Brazil entered into recession due to the expansion of public spending. However, he pledged that the government was reversing this trend, pointing to rising indicators of confidence among the industry and consumers.

Meirelles also assured that the new government is working to bring about a stable macro-economic environment in Brazil, reduce the size of the state, prioritize the efficiency of infrastructure tenders and increase privatization.

Brazil is currently living the worst recession in its history, with its economy having contracted by 3.8 percent in 2015 and expected to shrink by 3.16 percent in 2016. To this can be added a high inflation rate, which led the Central Bank to raise the basic interest rate to 14.25 percent, the highest level in a decade. Enditem