What went wrong with Brazil?
Analysis
BBC
4.6 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 19 June 2017
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
During Brazil's boom years the country's rising economy created a new middle class of gigantic proportions - tens of millions escaping from poverty. Brazil felt confident and even rich enough to bid for the 2016 Olympic Games. But then the economy turned.
In the last two years the country has endured its worst recession on record. Rio de Janeiro - the city that hosted the Olympics - is bankrupt. Many communities don't have functioning schools or clinics. Corruption is endemic.
David Baker, a regular visitor to Brazil, travels to Rio De Janeiro and São Paulo to find out where it went all wrong for the country, what's holding it back from being a great economic power and what the wider lessons are for developing countries across the world.
Producer: Alex Lewis.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.6 | My name's Linda Davies and I commission podcast for BBC Sounds. |
| 0:08.4 | As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable |
| 0:14.3 | experts and genuinely engaging voices. What you may not know is that the BBC |
| 0:20.4 | makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars, |
| 0:24.6 | poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples. |
| 0:29.7 | If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. |
| 0:36.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:41.0 | Hello, I'm David Baker and thank you for downloading this podcast. Not so long ago, Brazil was on the |
| 0:47.4 | crest of a wave. It was one of the bricks countries with a fast-growing economy, and it happily bid for and won the 2014 Football World Cup and |
| 0:56.6 | last year's Olympic Games. |
| 0:59.2 | Now however things are very different. |
| 1:01.9 | Brazil's economy has crashed and all that growth looks like being wiped out. |
| 1:06.4 | So I've come to Brazil to find out what went wrong and what we can learn from Brazil's |
| 1:10.8 | alarming rise and fall. |
| 1:17.0 | So now we're arriving at Daya's house. We're right at the side of a motorway here. |
| 1:19.0 | You can hear the traffic. |
| 1:21.0 | And there's a cage full of beautiful colored canaries. One |
| 1:26.8 | two three there's probably about two dozen canaries here jumping around in the |
| 1:31.3 | cage. I'm David Baker and for analysis this week I've come to |
| 1:37.0 | Brazil. Brazil is the B of the bricks. Five countries that back in 2001 were tipped to be the future powerhouses of the developing world. |
| 1:46.0 | It has a population of 200 million people and massive natural resources. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.