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Research has shown that credit discouragement is one of the most significant barriers deterring small businesses from accessing credit. Although credit discouragement is often associated with diminished expectations for successfully obtaining credit, the underlying causes of this phenomenon have not been explored fully. Adapting Loury’s (2021) feedback effect theory to the credit market, this study provides insights into the effect of race and emotional distress on credit discouragement among individual microentrepreneurs (IMEs) in Brazil. Using survey data collected in Rio de Janeiro and Salvador, the study confirms that Black and Brown IMEs who reported emotional distress in bank branches had a greater credit discouragement rate than those who did not. We also confirmed Brazil’s pigmentocratic pattern of inequality, with higher discouragement among Black IMEs compared to Brown and White IMEs.

A significant phenomenon of the international system over the past decade is the empowerment of emerging economies, particularly the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), in diplomatic and trade relations. Thus, alliances between China, the world’s largest developing country, and newly efficacious powers in the global South have become salient topics in foreign policy research. This article focuses on the relations China maintains with Portuguese-speaking countries, or Lusophonia, which are notable for their geographic and cultural heft in the global South. As a nation removed from foreign imperial influence only a few decades ago, China shares a series of cultural commonalities with a Brazil-dominated Lusophonia that represents key political influences in middle-income countries. As a result, Lusophone countries are core targets in an overall international policy strategy that serves to benefit China for continued trade and economic growth, an orientation well aligned to enhance Sino-Lusophone cooperation in the short to medium term.