Brazil and the Intangible Economy: How South America Is Navigating the Global Shift to Knowledge-Based Growth

A Structural Shift With Global Consequences

For decades, economic development in South America was measured in roads built, factories erected, and commodity volumes exported. A new report co-produced by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and Italy's Luiss Business School (LBS) signals that this calculus is changing — not just in wealthy nations, but across middle-income economies that have long depended on physical capital to grow.

Global investment in intangible assets — encompassing intellectual property, software, data, research and development, brands, and organizational know-how — crossed the USD 10 trillion mark for the first time in 2025. The third edition of the World Intangible Investment Highlights, which covers 29 high- and middle-income economies representing roughly 57 percent of world GDP, documents an annual growth rate of 5.5 percent for intangible investment between 2020 and 2025, compared with 3.2 percent for tangible investment. Intangibles now account for nearly 13 percent of GDP across the economies studied.

The report's inclusion of updated figures for Brazil — alongside first-ever estimates for Canada and the Philippines — makes this edition particularly relevant for analysts watching South American economic trajectories.

Brazil's Position on the Global Map

Among the report's most consequential findings for the region is Brazil's standing as one of the world's largest intangible investors. Brazilian companies and government entities invested USD 312 billion in intangible assets in 2023, a figure that places the country in rare company on a global scale.

The report situates Brazil alongside India and the Philippines as emerging economies where intangible investment is growing beyond what high-income country trends alone would predict. In India, intangible investment grew 5.3 percent annually over the past decade; in the Philippines, 3.9 percent — rates that exceed those recorded in several high-income economies. Brazil's absolute scale of its USD 312 billion figure makes the country a regional outlier and a data point that regional policymakers cannot ignore.

The Gap With Leading Economies Remains Stark

Context matters. While Brazil's absolute figures are large, the distance between South America and the leading intangible economies is considerable. Companies and government entities in the United States invested nearly USD 5 trillion in intangibles in 2025 — by far the most of any economy studied. The gap between the US and the next four economies combined has roughly doubled over the past decade, from about USD 1 trillion in 2015 to USD 2 trillion in 2025.

Japan ranked second globally at USD 810 billion in 2024, with Germany third at USD 695 billion. These figures underscore that South America, even with Brazil's significant investment base, remains at an early stage in the transition toward knowledge-intensive economic models relative to the economies setting the global pace.

Artificial Intelligence as Accelerant

The report identifies artificial intelligence as a force reshaping how intangible investment unfolds, through two distinct waves. The first involves physical infrastructure — data centers, semiconductors, power systems, and networks — that AI models require to operate. The second involves intangible assets: data sets, software platforms, R&D programs, organizational capital, and employee training.

The report's authors argue that AI's lasting economic impact will derive from the intangible assets built atop physical infrastructure.

Measurement as a Policy Challenge

One underappreciated finding in the report concerns what is not being counted. Much of the intangible investment happening across all economies — particularly in organizational capital, brand development, and workforce training — goes unrecorded in official statistics. The WIPO–LBS report relies on the Global INTAN-Invest Database, which tracks investment across intangible asset classes that fall outside conventional national accounts, following a methodology proposed by economists Corrado, Hulten and Sichel in 2005 and 2009.

For governments and central banks, this measurement gap reflects a technical limitation in how intangible investment is currently tracked in official data.

Remaining Questions

Several dimensions of this story remain unverified or unaddressed by the available source material and require further reporting:

• What is Brazil's specific annual growth rate for intangible investment over the past decade, and how does it compare directly to India and the Philippines?
• Which other South American economies — Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Peru — were considered for inclusion in the WIPO–LBS study, and what prevented their inclusion?
• What share of Brazil's USD 312 billion in intangible investment originates from the private sector versus government entities, and which sectors are driving it?
• How are South American governments currently measuring or failing to measure intangible investment in their national accounts, and are any adopting the Corrado-Hulten-Sichel framework?
• What role, if any, do regional trade blocs such as Mercosur or the Pacific Alliance play in coordinating intangible investment policy or IP harmonization across the continent?
• Are there country-specific data for AI-related intangible investment in South America, and which sectors — fintech, agritech, health tech — are leading that shift?

Several verified sources, together with artificial intelligence, were used in the preparation of this article. The content was reviewed by our editorial team prior to publication. Disclosure provided in accordance with Article 50 of the EU Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act).