Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio.

I'm your host, Jason Palmer.

Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

In Brazil, the signs of deep poverty are often right next door to signs of fabulous wealth,

and the inequality seems to be getting worse.

So, why is the country chipping away at a social safety net that seems to be doing good?

And there's a growing craze in Ethiopia for self-help and self-appointed good attitude gurus.

Even the Prime Minister reckons economic growth is just a matter of positive thinking.

Of course, it's a bit more complicated than that.

First up, though.

Today, Hong Kong released its latest GDP result, and as expected, it doesn't look good.

The city has been facing a range of economic and political challenges over the past year,

and its fortunes are strongly tied to those of the mainland.

So, as China's trade war with America has crimped growth there, it's squeezed Hong Kong's exports.

Yet, last year, the biggest threat to Hong Kong's economy appeared to be a political one.

A bill allowing extradition of Hong Kongers to the mainland sparked enormous protests,

and worries that the mainland would put them down violently.

Now, a new threat is compounding all these pressures, the coronavirus outbreak across the border.

Hong Kong's economy was already in a great deal of trouble.

Simon Cox is our emerging markets editor and is based in Hong Kong.

Figures released today showed that it shrank by 2.9 percent in the last few months of 2019,

compared with the same period of 2018 that follows a quarter of contraction before that.

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