Brazil’s tourism board on Tuesday confirmed that it has asked world football governing body FIFA and hotel operators to lower prices during the 2014 World Cup, after a study found that room rates will be up to 500 percent more expensive during the games.
Brazil’s tourism board Emratur said it fears that the “stratospheric increase” of rates announced for the World Cup period next year could damage the country’s image.
To outsiders, Brazilians don’t seem to have as much to complain about as the protesters in Greece, Turkey, or Egypt. Its economy has boomed for two decades and is now the world’s seventh largest. But inside Brazil, anger has been simmering for some time. Atrocious public services, government corruption and the extravagant spending on the FIFA World Cup are at the root of June’s mass demonstrations across 80 cities in Brazil.
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff on Monday proposed to set aside $25 billion in public transport investments and offered to hold a referendum on political reforms amid unprecedented social unrest that sparked two weeks of nationwide street protests against poor governance.
Credit ratings agency Standard and Poor’s cut Latin America’s largest economy’s outlook from stable to negative on Thursday, citing slugging economic growth and an expansionary fiscal policy that could lead to an increase in the government’s overall debt levels.
Brazil on Tuesday cut the financial transactions tax on overseas investments in domestic bonds from 6 percent to zero, a surprise move that could help stop a sharp depreciation of the real that threatens to stoke already high inflation in Latin America’s largest economy.
The removal of the tax, known as the IOF, will take effect from Wednesday and removes a key defence measure Brazil had put up in late 2009 to prevent a surge in hot money inflows after developed nations loosened their monetary policies to stimulate their economies.
The Brazilian government on Wednesday announced that it would freeze up to 28 billion reais ($13.7 billion) in obligatory and discretionary spending this year, following weak economic growth forecasts that could cut into its primary surplus target.
Speaking during a press conference in the capital, Brasilia, Finance Minister Guido Mantega said that the budget freeze would not affect investments set aside for the World Cup next year, as well as other government’s priorities, including education, health and infrastructure.
A visibly angry Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff on Monday ordered a federal investigation to determine the source of a widespread rumour, which had claimed that the government’s social security fund was about to be shut down – causing widespread panic and a bank run at the state-owned Caixa Economica Federal bank.
Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff will reattempt to pass a bill earmarking all oil royalties collected by the state to go into public education funding, reported Reuters on Wednesday, after Congress last year stalled a vote towards the initiative following threats of legal action by the nation’s main oil-producing states.
The Brazilian Congress late Tuesday passed a new law that would give the country’s domestic workers the same employment rights as any other worker in the country, reported Reuters, bringing an end to nearly two decades of unequal treatment, where housemaids and other staff did not have access to overtime or other healthcare benefits.
The main group representing supermarket chains in Brazil has pledged to discontinue sales of meat from cattle raised in the Amazon rainforest, reported the Associated Press, after years of deforestation caused by farmers cutting down trees for pasture.
