Brazil’s OECD membership on the back burner

Brazil’s Finance Minister Fernando Haddad on Wednesday said that a “working group” within the government will study the terms of Brazil’s accession to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) before President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva takes any decision on the matter.

“We already have here a working group with [the Finance Ministry’s Secretary for International Affairs] Tatiana Rosito,” Mr. Haddad told reporters at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

“We need to design a policy […], the ministries will align themselves to the decision of the president,” he added.

It turns out no such working group formally exists.

As The Brazilian Report showed, the new Lula administration has been coy about where it stands in regard to Brazil’s negotiations to join the OECD as a full member.

Joining the so-called “club of rich countries” has been a Brazilian goal since the country formally made an accession request in 2017, during the Michel Temer administration. 

OECD membership is widely regarded as a stamp of approval that a country is in line with best governance practices. In Brazil, efforts to meet OECD rules are believed to have helped improve the transparency and performance of state-owned companies, for example.

In 2019, the Jair Bolsonaro administration created a group, led by the chief of...