HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT FOR BRAZIL - 1996

According to the Report on Human Development, Brazil had at the beginning of the decade one of the highest inequality rates in the world in terms of income distribution, in regional terms as well as between the social strata.

Poverty, characterised as insufficiency of income, has taken on new characteristics. It has ceased to become predominantly rural and presents a more uniform distribution throughout the country, although there are some differences between the regions and in the urban and rural areas.

The lines of poverty adopted in the Report were estimated by units of the Federation and types of residences, starting from average selections of consumption observed in low income families and consumer prices in force in 1990, to take into account the local differences with regard to cost of living amongst the poor. Classified as poor are the persons with a per capita family income below the poverty line.

Based on this methodology, the number of the poor was calculated as 42 million, or 30% of the total population.

Back to the report's index