People pass in front of closed stores in São Paulo.Sebastiao Moreira / EFE
While more than 40 countries in the world have already started applying vaccines against covid-19, Brazil remains in political disputes, without a date for the start of immunization and has not yet approved the registration of any immunizer.
With more than 7.5 million cases registered, an upward trend in several states and almost 200,000 deaths from the disease, President Jair Bolsonaro has even said that he does not “care” or feel pressured by the advance of vaccination in the world.
The delay of a plan has serious consequences: a difficult resumption of the economy, which will suffer several setbacks in 2021, rising unemployment, inflation and the worsening of public accounts.
The image is clear.
The longer the country takes to implement the national vaccination plan, the longer the crisis will continue.
Economic activity is expected to decline by almost 5% by 2021. “The vaccine is the only effective way to solve the problem.
It is the only way for the economy to get back on track and not stay in this opening and closing of activities, in this uncertainty ”, explains Joelson Sampaio, coordinator of the economics course at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV).
According to him, the countries that have already made progress in immunizing the population will be the first to feel the effects on economic recovery.
Although the market projects a slightly more optimistic scenario for next year, betting on a growth of around 3.5% of the Gross Domestic Product, some financial institutions do not rule out a negative first quarter if vaccination does not start quickly and the records of the disease continue to increase.
”Let's hope everyone is vaccinated, because in a scenario with 400 deaths a day, a negative quarter can occur.
We need the death rate to go down.
Now [in the first weeks of December], the data has worsened, and this increases the risk of having a negative GDP in the first quarter of 2021, "said Mario Mesquita, chief economist at Itaú bank.
Added to this is the end of emergency aid, a benefit created to minimize the economic impacts of the pandemic.
At least 40 million people will start next year without this government support amid a pandemic.
The end of the aid will reduce the income of the most vulnerable population, the injection of money into the economy and should cause an increase in unemployment.
Many people who lost their jobs have not looked for another due to the pandemic and quarantine regulations.
The data published this Tuesday by the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) shows that the unemployment rate stood at 14.3% in the quarter that ended in October, an advance of 0.5 percentage points over the quarter that ended in July.
Brazil had 14.1 million unemployed in the quarter, 931,000 more than the previous moving quarter, which ended in July.
The increase in unemployment is a reflection of a greater number of Brazilians who decided to go out in search of a vacancy with the relaxation of the isolation rules.
In addition to the increase in the number of job seekers, there was a 2.8% increase in the employed population, which reached 84.3 million people.
“This scenario may be related to a recomposition, with the return of people who were out of their jobs.
In this quarter we saw a reduction in the population outside the labor force and this may have been reflected in the increase in people who are being absorbed by the labor market and also in the growth of the demand for labor ”, explains analyst Adriana Beringuy.
“We have an employed population that is reduced by almost 10 million people and an increase of 12 million in the population outside the force [which includes people who were not working or looking for work].
So this may be the beginning of a recomposition, but the accumulated losses in employment during the year are still very significant ”, he highlighted.
For Professor João Saboia, from the Institute of Economics of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), it is inevitable that the unemployment line will increase with the extinction of emergency aid, since the market will not be able to absorb all the people they will go back to look for work.
"Even those who get a new job will be poorly absorbed, informally or with a very low income level," he explains.
Most of the increase in the number of employed people in the last quarter came from informal work, according to IBGE.
In Saboia's assessment, the first quarter of 2021 should be the most worrying.
“Without help and probably without any vaccinations, it is difficult to think of how to return.
They are also the summer months when historically the economy has been slowest.
Then it may be that the activity starts to come out more from below, but everything will be very slow ”, he analyzes.
According to the XP brokerage group, the great source of uncertainty related to unemployment continues to be the transition from the end of aid to families and companies in 2021 with the challenges of the Brazilian economy, such as the reform program that can bring confidence , mainly, to the service sector in rehiring.
The brokerage group estimates that the unemployment rate will reach its highest level in the first quarter of 2021, reaching almost 16%.
Another headwind in early 2021 is inflation.
The pandemic has put pressure on prices, especially for food, and may have an impact as early as next year.
In the last months of the year, inflation accelerated and the National Consumer Price Index broad-15, a preview of official inflation, closed at 4.23%, above the 4% target.
The pressure was also caused by the decision of the National Electric Energy Agency (Aneel) to give a warning signal, increasing the value of the consumer's electricity bill in the last month of the year.
According to analysts, food prices are expected to start cooling in the first quarter.
For 2021, the goal set by the Central Bank is 3.75%, and the financial market estimates 3.34%, according to Focus.
Next year the trend is a "spread" of inflation.
The pandemic has also worsened the health of Brazil's public accounts, which have been in the red for years.
The accumulated fiscal deficit between January and November of this year was R $ 699.1 billion, the worst result of the historical series that began in 1997. In relation to the same period of 2019, there was a 9.7% decrease in revenues and a 39.3% advance in expenses.
The fiscal goal for this year admitted a deficit of up to 124,000 million in the accounts of the central government, but the approval by Congress of the decree of public calamity to face the pandemic authorized the Government to ignore the figure in 2020.
The Ministry of Economy noted that there are three challenges for next year: employment, credit and fiscal consolidation.
The portfolio projects a growth of 3.2% of GDP in 2021 and stated that "with vaccination gaining strength in the world, the international scenario will be favorable" for Brazil, since the international interest rate is low and it should maintain this level.
The country is in the middle of a political battle between Bolsonaro and São Paulo Governor João Dória in the race for a vaccine.
The country initially focused on the AstraZeneca vaccine.
The Bolsonaro government signed an agreement to carry out phase three immunization tests and technology transfer, with the promise of the production of millions of doses by Fiocruz.
Last Monday, Fiocruz said that it is in the process of continuous submission and that it should send the latest data to Anvisa before January 15.
São Paulo, however, says that it will begin its immunization on January 25 with the vaccine from the Chinese laboratory Sinovac, which has signed a cooperation agreement with the Butantan Institute.
But the São Paulo government has delayed the release of its vaccine efficacy data three times, while Sinovac is trying to combine data from global tests that include Indonesia, Turkey and Chile.