Brazil's economy ground to a near halt in the first quarter, burdened by turmoil in some of its main trading partners and an exhausted consumer class at home.

Gross domestic product expanded a seasonally adjusted 0.2% in the January to March period from the previous quarter, the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, or IBGE, said Friday. Compared with a year earlier, first-quarter growth amounted to 1.9%.

The results were in line with expectations. But they reaffirmed the prevailing view among economists that the world's No. 2 emerging market is on track to log yet another year of unimpressive growth.

"This year is already a loss for Brazil," said Alfredo Coutiño, director for Latin America at Moody's Analytics. "There haven't been any structural changes. The government seems to be more interested in elections, and the private sector is still waiting to see what will happen."

Brazil's GDP growth hasn't cracked 3% since 2010, when it surged 7.5% in a recovery from the global recession. Analysts surveyed by the central bank expect economic output to expand a meager 1.6% in 2014 and 1.9% next year.

"This confirms that the key impediments to growth in Brazil are structural and domestic rather than cyclical or external," said Goldman Sachs economist Alberto Ramos.

A sputtering economy and high inflation have fueled widespread unrest in the South American nation since last year's protests drew millions to the streets. In recent weeks, a wave of strikes by bus drivers, police officers and other public employees has crippled major cities such as São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro for entire days as workers demanded bigger pay raises.

That means the odds are stacked against a pickup in growth later in the year, said James Lockhart Smith, a Latin America analyst at risk consultancy Maplecroft, who thinks the World Cup will bring another series of protests.

"Work just isn't going to get done in the next few months," Mr. Lockhart Smith said. "There are a lot of disruptions."

Finance Minister Guido Mantega warned at a news conference that the World Cup, which starts June 12, could cut into the flagging industrial sector by reducing the number of working days. However, the tournament "will benefit commerce and services, since you'll have more consumption and tourists."

Brazil suffered in the first quarter as slowing economic growth in China, its top trading partner, weighed on prices for commodities such as iron ore and soybeans. Economic turmoil and a currency devaluation in neighboring Argentina—Brazil's third-biggest trading partner and one of the few countries that will buy its overpriced manufactured goods—hit the local auto sector.

Mr. Mantega blamed weakness abroad, particularly in the U.S., and accelerating inflation at home for the sluggish growth.

"The world's biggest economy, the U.S., contracted. That hurts us because it means the U.S. imported less," Mr. Mantega said. "Beyond that, we had an increase in inflation at the beginning of the year. That hurts family consumption."

Mr. Mantega expressed optimism about the second quarter, though, starting with consumer and business confidence.

"We have inflation falling, which returns purchasing power to consumers, and the volatility in international capital markets is diminishing," he said.

Economists at BBVA said Brazil faces an additional headwind caused by a severe drought that has dried up the country's hydroelectric reservoirs. Uncertainty created by the specter of electricity rationing was among the reasons for which the bank recently slashed its growth forecast for 2014 by 0.5 percentage point.

At the very least, analysts said the drought means the economy's lone bright spot in early 2014—a 3.6% quarterly increase in agricultural output—likely will prove short-lived. If not for that boost, growth would have been roughly flat, as industrial production declined 0.8% quarter-on-quarter and services expanded an anemic 0.4%, the IBGE said.

Separately, the Central Bank of Brazil reported Friday that the country's government, including central and regional levels, reported a 12-month primary surplus of 92.8 billion Brazilian reais in April, or 1.87% of gross domestic product. The result is higher than in March, when the primary surplus—or the government savings to pay down its debt—was 86.2 billion reais, or 1.75% of GDP.

For the month of April, the consolidated primary fiscal surplus was 16.9 billion reais, up from 3.6 billion reais in March.

Fundamentally, Brazil's economy remains hamstrung by an imbalance between consumption and investment, economists say. The wealth that flooded the country during the past decade's commodity boom was used to create a new middle class of consumers rather than to upgrade the country's roads, ports, factories and machinery.

That has left Brazil's economy short on hardware and unable to sustain faster growth rates. Despite recent government efforts to draw private investors into the country's infrastructure sector, gross investment in the January to March period contracted 2.1%, its third straight quarter of decline.

Families also have been tightening their belts in recent quarters as the bills piled up and high inflation forced the central bank to raise its baseline interest rate from 7.25% in April 2013 to 11% currently.

A "alarming" reflection of that trend came in the form of a 0.1% first-quarter decline in private consumption, said Neil Shearing, chief emerging markets economist at London-based research firm Capital Economics. It was only the third time in the past eight years that families have consumed less from one quarter to the next.

"The consumer engine is slowing and nothing else is really picking up the slack, which means the economy is going to struggle," Mr. Shearing said. "That's going to pressure the government to potentially loosen the purse strings later in the year."

Reinaldo Annicchino, owner of Cachaça do Rei, a maker of Brazil's national sugar-cane liquor, said he's feeling the pinch as distributors delay purchases.

"They don't want to have too much inventory," Mr. Annicchino said. "Consumers are holding back, so distributors buy less and I feel it, too."