Brazil: A year of Jair Bolsonaro

Addressing Brazil’s economic travails and the government’s widening fiscal deficit was going to be a necessity for whoever won the presidency. In 2018, Brazil was still struggling to recover from its biggest recession in recent history, which saw GDP contract by 7% in 2015-16. Growth was sluggish, unemployment stood at 12.3%, public debt amounted to 76.7% of GDP, and the government’s fiscal deficit totalled 7.1% of GDP.