Brasilia, Feb 5 (Inditop.com/EFE) The Brazilian finance minister has said that his country’s economy will grow by five percent this year and “pull away” from wealthy nations incapable of matching that pace.
Only Brazil, India, China and “a few more countries” will enjoy “meaningful growth” in 2010, Guido Mantega said, while the European Union is expected to grow by only 1 percent and Japan, 1.7 percent.
Brazil, he said, has “growth with quality”, as the economy is expanding in an environment of controlled inflation, stable macroeconomic indicators, job creation and increasingly equitable income distribution.
The minister cited recent data showing that Latin America’s largest economy created 995,000 new jobs last year and his office’s “conservative forecast” of an additional 1.6 million positions in 2010.
“Not in absolute terms, but proportionately, we are creating more employment than China,” Mantega said at a conference to review the first three years of the government’s Growth Acceleration Programme or PAC.
The PAC, which calls for the investment of roughly $250 billion in infrastructure projects, “has been key” to maintaining dynamism in the Brazilian economy amid the global recession, the finance minister said.
