Rio de Janeiro, Feb 26 (IANS/EFE): Economists at Brazil's leading banks predict that Latin America's largest economy will grow by 3.1 percent in 2013, according to the results from the central bank's latest weekly survey.

Despite the fact that analysts are less optimistic than the government, which is predicting growth of 4.0 percent for this year, projections indicate that the Brazilian economy will start to rebound in 2013 after the deceleration it suffered over the past two years as a result of the international financial crisis.

After registering an expansion of 7.5 percent in 2010, growth was only 2.7 percent in 2011 and, according to the latest estimates, it will not exceed 1.0 percent for 2012.

Regarding inflation this year, the analysts slightly reduced their prediction from 5.7 percent calculated a week ago to 5.69 percent in the new survey.

Inflation was 5.84 percent in 2012, but the government has set an inflation target of 4.5 percent for 2013.