Brazil today and tomorrowJoyce, L. E. Elliott (Lilian Elwyn Elliott)
History
Brazil today and tomorrow
Joyce, L. E. Elliott (Lilian Elwyn Elliott)
Brazil; Brazil -- Economic conditions
The fabric-weaving factories in all Brazil, including cloths of cotton,
jute, linen, silk and wool, were 303 in number in 1914, employing 75,000
workpeople and capital totalling over 368,000 contos of reis; in 1920
they had increased to 328 including 242 cotton mills which alone
employed 109,000 hands. The premier producer of cotton cloth in 1920, in
values, was Rio de Janeiro (Federal District) with an output worth
102,000 contos; next came S. Paulo State, 92,000 contos; then Minas
Geraes, 91,000; Rio de Janeiro State, 46,000; Bahia, 32,000; Pernambuco,
21,000; Alagôas, 16,000; Sergipe, 12,000; Maranhão, 11,000; Rio Grande
do Sul, 9,000; Ceará, 3,000; and Piauhy, Rio Grande do Norte, Paraná,
Parahyba and Espirito Santo, about 1,200 contos each. The States absent
from cloth manufacturing returns are the great forestal territories of
the extreme north, and those of the vast interior uplands, where
conditions are not greatly changed from the time prior to the Portuguese
discovery so far as development is concerned.
In numbers of mills São Paulo again comes first with seventy-eight mills
making cloths: fifty-five of these weave cotton alone, leaving a higher
proportion of fabrics made from other materials than in sister States;
generally speaking cotton cloths occupy the greatest share of capital
and labour, as for example in Minas, where sixty _fabricas de tecidos_
operate, and out of the total value of the production, 23,500 contos,
cotton accounts for over 22,600 contos. With a larger number of
cotton-cloth mills at work than S. Paulo, but with production worth not
much more than one-fourth, it is clear that factories are very much
smaller in the interior State; nevertheless, she is able to pride
herself upon a thriving industry, occupying nearly nine thousand people,
twenty-five thousand contos of capital, and using ten thousand tons of
raw cotton. In common with the other weaver States of the Brazilian
Union, Minas ships her cloths to less industrially developed regions: in
this connection some light is shed upon the ramifications of finance cum
industry by the President of the Sociedade Mineira da Agricultura (Minas
Society of Agriculture), Dr. Daniel de Carvalho, in an address at the
Cotton Conference held in Rio in June, 1916. Stating that the Minas
export of cotton cloth (to other States) was nearly 28,000,000 metres in
1915, he showed that, at an average price of four hundred reis (eight
cents) a metre, the total value was more than eleven thousand contos:
but in the official statistics the value of exported cotton cloth
appeared as only 3,893 contos. “This anomaly is an example of the
regimen of fiction in which we live, from the taxation point of view.
The Minas legislator votes for high and sometimes excessive taxes,—and
the Government in a fatherly manner corrects the excess in calculations
of ad valorem percentages, accepting a benign interpretation of
merchandise values. Instead of products appearing with exaggerated
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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