She’s earned a Forbes magazine cover story, and now Brazil’s president, Dlima Rousseff, attracts Bloomberg Businessweek‘s attention for her turn away from standard socialist policies.
Rousseff is a former guerrilla and political activist whose sympathies are clearly on the left.
Yet she’s so determined to get Brazil’s economy growing again that she’s abandoned her Workers’ Party line to open the country’s crumbling infrastructure to private management. She’s also adopted an industry-backed agenda to cut costs for business, Bloomberg Businessweek reports in its Sept. 24 issue. …
… In the last month, Rousseff has announced payroll-tax cuts, reduced the rates industry pays for power, offered private companies licenses to build and operate roads and railways, and unveiled plans to do the same for major airports and ports. The licenses are especially radical in Brazil, where the ruling Workers’ Party does not like to give up any control of public assets to the private sector. But if Rousseff can sell her ideas, she can tap billions of dollars in investment capital to modernize and revive infrastructure without increasing taxes.
