Generating the Wealth of Nations 18: A Rolling 10-Year Average Annual Rate of Growth for Brazil

Because there was some dicussion about how well (or poorly) Brazil is doing, I used the Maddison Project data to construct the following chart.  What a "rolling 10-year" average annnual rate of growth means is this:  The value shown for 1880 is the average annual rate of growth from 1870 to 1880; for 1881, the average annual rate of growth from 1871 to 1881; and so on.  The final data point is the avarage annual rate of growth from 2000 to 2010.

(Click to enlarge.)

What's happening here is not simple to characterize, and I'm guessing it's not simple to explain.  Basically, the rate of growth was rising from around 1900 until the Great Depression hit (almost everywhere) in about 1930), then the rate of growth accelerated again until about 1980, after which there was a decade of stagnation.  (Wasn't there a series of debt crises that affected a lot of Latin America in that decade).  And, finally, we see accelerating rates of growth again from 1990 to 2010.  I'm not familiar with the internal dynamics of Brazil's politics or its economic policies or any cultural or institutional factors that may be relevant.  But at least that's the pattern of things.