Brazil for sale? does Sino-Brazilian trade or investment significantly influence Brazil's United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) voting pattern?

Abstract

This thesis examines whether Sino-Brazilian trade or investment significantly influences Brazil's voting in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). To examine this relationship, this thesis regresses a dataset of UNGA votes, which the literature commonly uses to represent political influence, with trade and investment data. Understanding whether the growing Sino-Brazilian economic relationship politically impacts Brazil is important both to Brazil and to the United States. Any increase in Chinese influence on Brazil may translate into a corresponding decrease in U.S. influence, which may have implications for the health of Brazil's democracy, regional stability and U.S. national security. This thesis crafts, for the first time in the literature on Sino-Brazilian relations, an estimable empirical model that examines whether trade or investment influences UNGA voting behavior between these two nations; this is an improved methodology for evaluating this relationship as previous studies relied on simple correlations. This thesis makes five hypotheses, and tests them with two types of voting affinity measurements using both regression analysis and simple correlations. This thesis finds that Brazil's exports to China have a statistically significant, positive relationship, and U.S. aid has a statistically significant, negative relationship, to Sino-Brazilian voting affinity.