In Brazil: The Poor Get Richer Faster
ELMAT:How savage the Brazilian capitalism was? PNAD says: Brazil, even after all this progress is among the 12 most unequal countries in the world. (Brazil used to be the sixth worse distribution of income in the world)
It’s a tale of two Americas. One, in the North, has the rich getting richer faster. That’s the U.S. of course. In South America, Brazil is seeing the opposite happen. The poor are getting richer faster.
And it’s not all because of dreaded “government handout”.
Brazilian workers making up the lowest 10 percent of the labor force in terms of income had higher salary increases than the remaining 90 percent of the labor force, including Brazil’s wealthy, the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) said in their National Household Sample Survey released last week.
Wages for Brazil’s poorest workers grew an impressive 29.2 percent between 2009 and 2011, and during the same period, the average income of the general labor force grew 8.3 percent. By comparison, our average income is rising by, what? A penny? Something like that.
“Brazil is showing the world that it is possible to grow and include at the same time, and that the inclusion of the poorest contributes to the growth of the country,” said Social Development Minister Tereza Campello in a statement.
Including all income sources, the average monthly income of workers in Brazil showed a real gain of 4.6 percent, having reached R$ 1,279 (US$ 631). Thus, the measure of inequality (Gini coefficient) fell from 0.518 in 2009 to 0.501 in 2011 in Brazil. This increase in income distribution brought the index down in all forms of calculation. The closer the index is to zero, the more equal is the distribution of income. While the poor are getting richer in Brazil while the poor get poorer in the U.S., there is still no comparing poverty and even middle class incomes in the two countries. Social services and state safety nets in the U.S. are more elaborate and sophisticated than they are in Brazil. And despite growing inequality in the U.S. over the last several years, Brazil has a ways to go before there is more uniformity in the social classes. However, if the U.S. keeps at it — with low wages, an education system that focuses too heavily on liberal arts, and punitive higher education costs — we should be on par with Brazil in a couple of generations |
