Early July we already notified on Google Brazil kickstarting Google Streetview in Brazil. Several expats have written about it. A Flickr user in Belo Horizonte has now spotted the Google Fiat cars in the wild.

Brazil became at an explosive rate one of the top Internet user nations.  Twitter is big in Brazil, 15% of the Brazilian Internet users visited Twitter and Facebook is picking up fast.  Last week the Facebook founder gave a speech in Sao Paulo to hook up more users.    Yahoo launched there Meme service only in Portuguese, Apple opened several flagship stores in Sao Paulo and is in the process of launching its online store in Portuguese.  They are even opening cute mini stores in malls like this Itaim mini Apple store.

Willem Buiter published an article in the Financial Times on one of my favorite topics of debate: greenhouse gas emissions and the right of equaly pollution per capita.

Everytime someone comes up with the argument that the effects of making ethanol would be dramatics for CO2 emissions I come up with these statistics: an average Brazilian yields 20 times less CO2 emissions than the average American.  Moreover: the growth of CO2 emissions of the average America is, despite the fact that he already emits 20 times more CO2, is still 3 times as high as that of the average Brazilian.

But this whole debate gets really interesting when you scrap out the “poor factor” from Willem Buiter’s argumentation, in a mathematical way.
How to do that?  Very simpel: you look at the GDP a country produces and devide it by the total CO2 emission of that country.

If you would take the US (14.264.700 million US$ GDP and 5.902,75 million metric tons CO2) as an index 100, you get the following indexes for:

France: 35 (almost 3 times more efficient that the US in making 1US$ GDP, CO2-wise)
China: 330 (more than 3 times less efficient than the US in making 1US$ GDP, CO2-wise)
South Africa: 385 (peforms even worse than the China in making 1 US$ GDP, CO2 wise; this is due to the massive consumption of coal in SA for their electricity)
India: 226 (twice as inefficient as the US in producing 1 US$ GDP CO2 wise)

Brazil scores 57, this puts the country in the class of a developing country like France as to being competitive in creating 1U$ GDP with as little CO2 emission as possible.

Conclusion: Brazil’s low score in emission per capita is much better than India’s low score per capita.   Becausse Brazil succeeds creating 1US$ GDP with almost 400% less CO2 emissions than eg. China.

We wrote early June on the Brazilian employment market which remained very resiliant to the crisis.
Today the June figures were release: the unemployment fell further down from 8,9% in May to 8,1% in June.  This is  the same as in May 2008, which was a record year for Brazil in terms of employment occupation.
If you put this figures in a historical perspective (see below chart) you see the strength of this performance.
The USA unemployment rate went up to 9,5% and the South African unemployment rate went up above 23%.

Tags: employment, unemployment

Dilma Roussef just announced that the bidding for the Rapid Train connection between Rio and Sao Paulo will start and that the winning consortium will be choosen in June 2010. The whole project would cost R$ 34,6 billion, 57% above the original foreseen budget.

The direct ride from Sao Paulo center (Campo do Marte)  to Rio center (Barao de Maua) will take 94 minutes and cost around R$ 200 in peak times and R$ 150 in off-peak times.

You can also take the regional traject which starts in Campinas, over Aeroporto Viracopos, via Sao Paulo center (Campo de Marte), the international airport of Guarulhos in Sao Paulo, Sao Jose dos Campos (hometown of Embraer), Volta Redonda, international airport Galeao of Rio and Rio center (Barao de Maua).
This means you would be able to get in less than 80 minutes and 3 stops from Galaeo internationalk airport in Rio to Sao Paulo international airport in Sao Paulo; which will open interesting perspectives.
The project will be finalised before the worldcup 2014 in Brazil and will surely have a huge impact on the Rio and Sao Paulo innerstate growth and dynamics.

We wrote a while ago on the massive amount of Internet users in Brazil; New Scientist just published an updated report, Brazil now 67.500.000n Internet users, that is more than Germany, the UK or India.
The most surprising number is however the growth pace of Internet users in Brazil.
In Germany there were 47.200.000 internet users in 2004, today Germany has 52.500.000 Internet users; that is a modest growth of 11,2% in 5 years.

Brazil counted 19.300.000 Internet users in 2004, today Germany 67.500.000 Internet users; that is a growth of 249,7% and this is an accelarating growth; only in the last 2,5 years the amount of Brazilian Internet users grew 160,6%. And saturation is far from being reached, even today only 26% of Brazil’s population is connected and with the growing middle class the amount of Internet users will continue to grow exponentially. In less then 18 months from here Brazil will have more than 50% of the amount of Internet users that the United States has.

(Internet) entrepeneur in Belgium? You might want to consider joining the Flanders export & trade mission to Brazil in November.

Tags: internet users brazil