Abstract
Trade between Brazil and Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries experienced a fourfold increase in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The main question is if it was a sign of the beginning of the long-expected deeper integration of Brazil with African countries. This chapter relies on trade data from 2000 to 2018 to offer some evidence and answers. Trade boomed during most part of this period mainly due to higher oil prices, the bulk of Brazilian imports from the Sub-Saharan African countries. Despite being much more diversified than imports, exports from Brazil were concentrated in a few countries (mainly Angola, Nigeria and South Africa) and in a few products (mainly sugar and meat). There is some evidence that trade promotion could explain part of higher Brazilian exports, but politics of trade do not seem to be the answer for a deeper trade integration between Brazil and Sub-Saharan Africa.
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Change history
24 December 2020
Correction to: Mathias Alencastro, Brazil-Africa Relations in the 21st Century: From Surge to Downturn and Beyond https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55720-1
Notes
- 1.
See Schor (2004) for a brief description of the trade liberalisation in the 1990s in Brazil.
- 2.
Data from the United Nations Comtrade.
- 3.
The main source of trade data used in this chapter is from the UN Comtrade database. It is a repository of official international trade statistics which contains disaggregated data for most countries for a long time period. In order to increase data consistency, it was used wherever possible data reported from Brazil – that is, Brazilian imports from SSA countries instead of exports from SSA countries to Brazil. Some data were also collected from the World Integrated Trade Solution (WITS) at the World Bank. The WITS platform offers some extremely useful aggregated trade statistics.
- 4.
Oil price data are from the International Monetary Fund Primary Commodity Prices database.
- 5.
Ribeiro (2007) presents a series of interviews with Brazilian diplomats and businessmen, which shows the diplomatic effort in promoting Brazilian firms and trade with several African countries. In one of these interviews (197), a Brazilian diplomat describes a trip to Botswana where they were accompanied by several Brazilian businessmen eager to engage with Botswanan businessmen. He cites two important Brazilian meat producers.
- 6.
Vieira (2014) finds that Brazilian trade did not respond to diplomatic efforts in the 1992–2008 period, including the increase of export share to Global South partners as the SSA countries. The author, however, considers only signed agreements as a proxy for diplomatic effort. Here, the argument concerns trade promotion instruments and not trade agreements which, as discussed below, did in fact probably have small, if any, impact on trade value.
- 7.
This seems especially true if the diplomatic efforts in promoting trade were responsible for the impressive increase in trade experienced by the meat sector. There seems to be still other instruments to be used by firms that involve less political costs and lead to rapid gains. Formal trade negotiations are costly and time-consuming.
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Schor, A. (2021). Brazilian Trade with Sub-Saharan Africa (2000–2018). In: Alencastro, M., Seabra, P. (eds) Brazil-Africa Relations in the 21st Century. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55720-1_4
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