The giant factory town that might be a giant mistake

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 30.5K Ratings

🗓️ 22 May 2026

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How does a poor country become a rich country? There's a simple blueprint — or at least, that's what many economists used to believe. But over the years, a lot of rapidly developing economies have stalled out. These countries aren't poor anymore, but they're not rich either. They're stuck in the middle. The World Bank calls this problem the "middle income trap."

And if there's a poster child for the middle income trap, many would point to Brazil. For a time, Brazil had one of the fastest growing economies in the world. On today's show, we head to Brazil to understand why the old blueprint for economic development might not work so well anymore.

The story starts in the Amazon rainforest. With an audacious plan to industrialize the country as fast as possible.

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This episode of Planet Money was hosted by Jeff Guo. It was produced by James Sneed and Luis Gallo. It was edited by Marianne McCune, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, translation help from Sarah Robbins. It was engineered by Robert Rodriguez and Jimmy Keeley. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.

A very, very special thanks to Carrie Kahn and Valdemar Geo from NPR’s Rio bureau. Also to Otaviano Canuto and Denis Minev.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:06.0	A couple hundred years ago, some countries suddenly got rich quick.
0:11.3	They started growing at rates never before seen in history.
0:14.6	Countries like England, Germany, the United States.
0:18.0	What these countries had in common were smokestacks, were steam engines and
0:22.9	factories. They had all industrialized. And for a long time, a lot of other countries thought,
0:29.5	okay, that is how you get rich. There's the blueprint. Some of them went to extraordinary lengths
0:35.4	to follow that blueprint. A couple of months ago, plant money producer Luis Gio and I went to get a better look at what
0:41.8	one of those countries tried.
0:44.0	We started down a dark jungle path.
0:46.8	Do you like snakes?
0:48.4	I don't love them, but...
0:50.5	What about spiders?
0:52.0	I don't love them either.
0:54.4	I like dogs.
0:56.2	There were no dogs in the rainforest,
0:59.3	but our destination was a big steel observation tower.
1:04.2	Ooh, is there an elevator?
1:06.9	And after climbing ten flights of stairs,
1:10.2	we reached the top, where we saw rainforest stretching
1:14.5	all the way to the horizon, except...
1:17.4	I hear it.
	...

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