Rio de Janeiro – Mean annual economic growth in Brazil from 2000 to 2011 was 3.7%, as per a revision issued this Wednesday (11th) by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). The IBGE has revised growth rates since 2000 due to the adoption of a new calculation methodology for the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the sum of all goods and services produced in the country.
The mean rate calculated using the former method was 3.5%, i.e. 0.2 percentage point lower than new one. The changes adhere to the recommendations of the Quarterly National Accounts Manual (SNA 2008) issued by the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United Nations (UN) and the World Bank.
"In 2011, we started a process of revising the national accounts system, based on the new manual. All countries would work on its implementation so that national accounts systems around the world could be compared. Today, we finally begin announcing the new national accounts series,” said IBGE chairwoman Wasmália Bivar.
After the revision, the GDP growth rate in 2011, for instance, rose from 2.7% to 3.9%. The rate in 2010 went from 7.5% to 7.6%.
The new methodology takes under consideration, for example, new product and service classifications, data from the 2006 Agricultural Census, the 2008/2009 Family Budgets Survey, the 2010 Demographic Census and the updated tax framework.
The new calculations have also led to a drastic change in the shares of different economic activities in the GDP. Agriculture, for instance, which accounted for 5.5% of Brazil’s productive sector in 2011, now accounts for 5.1%. The share of industry in overall activity also dropped for 2011, from 27.5% to 27.2%. The share of services has grown, from 67% to 67.7%.
On the demand side, family and government consumption accounted for 79% in 2011, under the new methodology, and 81% under the old one. The share of investment was 19.7% in 2011 as per former calculations, has gone up to 21.8%. The share of exports has gone from 11.9% to 11.5%, and imports have dropped from 12.6% to 12.2%.
*Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum
