This book examines how transformations in Brazil's social, economic and political organization affect the demographic behaviour of people who live in different parts of the country and who occupy different positions in the social system. The authors review the history of unequal development and document the concentration of income and land ownership. Using data from the 1970 and 1980 censuses, they show how the Brazilian style of economic growth unequally affected different population subgroups. Mortality estimates for white and non-white people measure the consequences of racial inequality on the life chances of children. Other chapters investigate rural out-migration, the impact of Amazon colonization schemes on rural poverty, and the implications of differential rates of population growth among rich and poor households for future patterns of inequality and underemployment. The overall perspective places the concept of inequality at the centre of the study of demographic and structural change.

This book presents multidisciplinary analyses of the historical trajectories of social and economic inequalities in Brazil over the last 50 years. As one of the most unequal countries in the world, Brazil has always been an important case study for scholars interested in inequality research, but in the last few decades has brought a new phenomenon to renew researchers’ interest in the country. While the majority of democracies in the developed world have witnessed an increase in income inequality from the 1970s on, Brazil has followed the opposite path, registering a significant reduction of income inequality over the last 30 years. Bringing together studies carried out by experts from different areas, such as economists, sociologists, demographers and political scientists, this volume presents insights based on rigorous analyses of statistical data in an effort to explain the long term changes in social and economic inequalities in Brazil. The book adopts a multidisciplinary approach, analyzing the relations between income inequality and different dimensions of social life, such as education, health, political participation, public policies, demographics and labor market. All of this makes Paths of Inequality in Brazil – A Half-Century of Change a very valuable resource for social scientists interested in inequality research in general, and especially for sociologists, political scientists and economists interested in the social and economic changes that Brazil went through over the last two decades.

The objective of this paper is to explore the interplay between schooling and demographics in Brazil. We would like to provide a preliminary answer to the question of how long will improvements in schooling of younger cohorts take o change the distribution of educational endowments of the total labor force. This answer depends on two factors. The first is the demographic composition of the working age population - the weight each cohort has in the 16 to 70 year old population. The second is the distribution of schooling within each cohort - its average educational level and the inequality within each cohort. These two factors - demography and education by cohort - define the average educational level and the distribution of education for the working age population in any given year. This paper takes a standard demographic projection and makes various hypotheses about the evolution of education - both the mean and inequality. According to these hypotheses, we will calculate how long improvements in the schooling of successive cohorts take to translate into significant improvements in the schooling of the working age population. Our results are somewhat pessimistic. We calculate that even very strong departures from the observed trend will take many years or decades to translate into significantly different educational endowments for the working age population. In other words, we show that demographic inertia is a strong factor preventing changes in educational endowments in periods shorter than a few decades.

What makes Brazil so unequal? This title looks at this question and shows how inequalities weaken Brazil's economic development and what are the best policy options to reduce this inequity.

In this study, we document the decline in income inequality and a convergence in consumption patterns in Brazilian states in a new database constructed from micro data from the national households’ survey. We adjust the state-Gini coefficients for spatial price differences using information on households’ rental prices available in the survey. In a panel regression framework, we find that labor income growth, formalization, and schooling contributed to the decline in inequality during 2004-14, but redistributive policies, such as Bolsa Família, have also played a positive role. Going forward, it will be important to phase out untargeted subsidies, such as public spending on tertiary education, and contain growth of public sector wages, to improve budgetary efficiency and protect gains in equality.

Brazil is in the middle of a profound socioeconomic transformation driven by demographic change. Because of profound changes in mortality and, especially, fertility over the past four decades the population at older ages then begun to increase, a trend that will become more and more rapid as time progresses. While it took more than a century for France's population, aged 65 and above, to increase from 7 to 14 percent of the total population, the same demographic change will occur in the next two decades in Brazil (between 2011 and 2031). The elderly population will more than triple within the next four decades, from less than 20 million in 2010 to approximately 65 million in 2050. On the one side, these shifts in population age structure will lead to substantial additional fiscal pressures on publicly financed health care and pensions, along with substantial reductions in fiscal pressures for publicly financed education. Public transfers in Brazil have been very effective in reducing poverty among the elderly in both urban and rural areas. However, without substantial changes, the aging of the population will put a strain on the current system that will result in some critical trade-offs with consequence for poverty among other vulnerable groups and for the growth prospects of the country. One the other side, given the strong association between people's economic behavior and the life cycle, changes in the population age structure have a major impact on economic development. This book investigates the impact of demographic changes on several dimensions of the Brazilian economy and society. It does so in a comprehensive and systematic way that captures the broad complexity of issues, from economic growth to poverty, from public financing of social services and transfers to savings, from employment to health and long-term care, and their interrelations.

This open access book draws the big picture of how population change interplays with politics across the world from 1990 to 2040. Leading social scientists from a wide range of disciplines discuss, for the first time, all major political and policy aspects of population change as they play out differently in each major world region: North and South America; Sub-Saharan Africa and the MENA region; Western and East Central Europe; Russia, Belarus and Ukraine; East Asia; Southeast Asia; subcontinental India, Pakistan and Bangladesh; Australia and New Zealand. These macro-regional analyses are completed by cross-cutting global analyses of migration, religion and poverty, and age profiles and intra-state conflicts. From all angles, this book shows how strongly contextualized the political management and the political consequences of population change are. While long-term population ageing and short-term migration fluctuations present structural conditions, political actors play a key role in (mis-)managing, manipulating, and (under-)planning population change, which in turn determines how citizens in different groups react.