ECONOMIC AND FINANCIAL IMPORTANCE— 
FEDERAL AND STATE REVENUE— 
EXPORTATION TAX 
The most superficial examination of the actual economic po- 
sition of Brazil demonstrates at once and in an incisive manner 
how important the rubber industry is to the national life of the 
country. 
Possessor of the innumerable riches distributed by the three 
Kingdoms of Nature, it is almost exclusively due to the cultiva- 
tion of coffee and to the extraction of rubber that Brazil owes 
its extraordinary commercial development in’ these last twenty 
ears. 
- The great fortunes which the plantations of the famous red- 
bean of the coffee-tree created in the South and the considerable 
profits which the exploitation of the precious gum have pro- 
duced in the North, were certainly the causes which most influ- 
enced the development of the production to such an extraor- 
dinary degree, relegating to a much lower schedule in the gen- 
eral tabular statement of Brazilian exportation, all the products, 
whose commerce although certainly remunerative, does not show 
such certain and speedy results. 
The general exportation of Brazilian merchandise was £63,- 
724,440 in 1909, £63,091,547 in 1910 and £66,838,982 in 1911. To 
these totals, coffee and rubber contributed during each of the 
same three years £52,401,276, £51,342,278 and £55,458,221 re- 
spectively—totals these, sufficient by themselves, to guarantee 
with advantage the Brazilian international commercial equilib- 
rium, when it is seen that in those said same years, the general 
importation of merchandise amounted to £37,139,354, £47,871,974 
and £52,798,016. 
Rubber contributed to the general total of exportation with 
29.70 per cent in 1909, 39.06 per cent in 1910 and 22.53 per cent 
in 1911, or in other words an average of 30.43 per cent per an- 
num. It is worthy of note, that the great difference which took 
place in the above-mentioned percentages is explained in 
the fluctutions in the prices of rubber, since the production not 
only did not decrease, but, as a matter of fact, increased from 
year to year. Therefore it is seen that nearly one-third of Bra- 
zil’s export trade is supplied by rubber, and it is nearly twenty 
millions of pounds sterling that Brazil receives every year, and 
which goes far to provide for the sustentation, not only of the 
population of the Brazilian Northwest, comprised in the great 
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