Brazil Weekly readers have spoken. For the last few months we have been running a poll on Brazil’s expected GDP growth in 2013.

By the beginning of 2013 officials and foreign observers still worked with the assumption that Brazil’s economy would grow well again this year, some 3-4%. But soon both Brazil’s government and several other parties started lowering their expectations for month after month. A central bank survey of around 100 economists said in August 9th that Brazil’s gross domestic product will expand just 2.21% this year and 2.50% next year, down from the previous week’s estimates of 2.24% and 2.60% respectively. Today, barely two weeks later, the BCB published newer figures and they have been lowered again: for 2013 they now expect 2.20% GDP growth and for 2014 a mediocre 2.40%.

So what do readers or Brazil Weekly think? More than enough votes have been cast to give a clear picture. Furthermore, while we monitored the progress of the poll, the number of votes cast for each option remained remarkably stable. Brazil Weekly readers are a mature and reliable lot. Several election outcomes have been well predicted by them in our polls (except for the PT victory in last year’s poll on Sao Paulo’s next Mayor, because we guess there are few workers among our readers).

Around 36% of votes cast, the relative majority, said Brazil will just grow between 1% and 2% this year, while 26% said it will grow between 2% and 3%. Third came voters (16%) that said Brazil will only grow between 0% and 1%. On the other hand, 9% said Brazil’s GDP will grow as predicted earlier, between 3% and 4%. Some 6% however predicted zero growth and 5% are sure the economy will even contract in 2013. Just 3% said Brazil will grow more that 4%.

On average that is a predicted growth of a mere 1,67% for 2013, significantly lower than the official forecasts. Let’s wait and find out if Brazil Weekly readers were right by the end of the year. By the way, that’s quite close to HSBC’s most recent forecast for Brazil’s 2013 GDP growth of 1.9%.