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'Made In Brazil' Under Pressure, Study Shows

This article is more than 9 years old.

Brazil is more than samba and soccer. But the airplanes it makes and the soybeans it grows are coming under increasing cost pressures, making a number of manufacturers there lose ground to competitors in the U.S.

A new study by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), made public on Tuesday, said that Brazil was one of a handful of 25 major exporters that was losing its competitive edge to other countries in the Americas.  In this case, the U.S. and Mexico are often beating Brazil to the punch.

“Improving the productivity of each worker is becoming an increasingly important factor in manufacturing competitiveness across the globe,” said Michael Zinser, a BCG partner. “This is especially true as the once-considerable wage gaps between developed and developing economies continue to shrink.”

BCG's study looked at manufacturing costs over a 10 year period to come up with its competitiveness index. 

Out of a list of five nations deemed "under pressure", Brazil is feeling the most pressure of all.  It's even worse than China, primarily due to higher labor costs.

According to BCG, Brazil's average manufacturing costs were around 3% lower than the U.S. in 2004 but are now estimated to be 23% higher on average.

Higher labor costs, coupled with Brazil's historically poor logistical bottlenecks, continue to dull Brazil's competitive edge.

Brazil may be a lot poorer than the U.S., with per capita GDP under $15,000 annually, but it is not a cheap country to conduct business. Tax burdens, infrastructure concerns, and a volatile currency have held back a number of Brazilian businesses, BCG researchers said.

One of the problems: worker productivity.

It takes more Brazilian workers to produce the same amount of goods as it does in the U.S., which relies more on automated assembly lines.

Brazil's government, like China's, is more interested in job creation than production. And as a result, the situation for manufacturing has become worse, the study showed. Weak productivity has led to a 26 percentage-point manufacturing-cost increase compared with the U.S. from 2004 to 2014.

Full employment in Brazil was never really an outspoken political policy of the ruling Workers' Party. Nor did the idea have many detractors.  Low unemployment has come with a price, but it was a price that Brazil had to pay.

Brazilian society has been divided greatly along race and class lines for generations. But in the early 2000s, social inclusion programs radically changed that. The poorest of the poor, all located in the northern half of the country, saw impressive wage gains of 10% or more.

New social welfare programs required children to be in school, which meant more work for educations, more money for education, and more time for women to look for employment as children were taken out of the labor force. Incomes rose across the board in Brazil, but the poor saw double digit gains, even greater than the richest one percent in the country.  As these programs continued to change the social status of a majority of Brazilians, the government and the largest corporations, often dependent on federal banks for credit lines and tax breaks, made certain they did their part and kept the job market humming. Unemployment remains near historic lows -- around 5.5% -- even as the economy is in decline.

Factory wages have more than doubled in the past 10 years. Higher incomes are typically a healthy sign of development. And the past decade was one of steady and stable economic growth that enabled millions of households to leap from poverty to the middle class. The rising wages did not lead to productivity gains, a problem many Brazilian companies have to contend with in a globalized economy.

BCG said that total labor productivity improved by only 1% per year from 2004 to 2014, ranking Brazil 19th out of the 25 economies in the group's competitiveness index.

In a January 2013 report, BCG researchers said the country's high wage growth and weak productivity gains were due to skilled labor shortages, under-investment by corporations, inadequate infrastructure, and government bureaucracy.  In their latest, a 60% leap in natural-gas costs have also hurt competitiveness.  Unfortunately, Brazil's reliance on cheap hydroelectricity does not always work to its advantage.

Brazil is tied with Italy and Belgium as the fourth least-cost-competitive manufacturing economy, BCG said.