ABSTRACT
The relationship between Brazil and the United States is fascinating but puzzling. Brazil is a country that, on a wide list of measures and indices, matters both to the outside world as a whole and to the United States in particular. It is the fifth most populous country in the world (with a 2004 population of 182 million), after China, India, Indonesia, and the United States, and ahead of Japan and Russia. It has the world’s twelfth largest gross domestic product (GDP), dropping from being the eighth largest in 1998. It is the largest country in South America (comprising 45 percent of the population of Central and South America and contributing 51.5 percent of the regional GDP). Brazil’s is the seventh largest economy in terms of services output, the third largest producer of meat, the second largest producer of fruit and of sugar, and the third largest producer of oil seeds.
