Nielmar de Oliveira
Reporter - Agência Brasil

Rio - Policies adopted by the government and the upgrading of Social Security benefits are responsible for "a substantial decrease" in social inequalities in Brazil. This observation, made by the head of the Getúlio Vargas Foundation's (FGV) Center for Social Policies, Marcelo Néri, is based on the study, "Growth for the Poor: the Brazilian Paradox," prepared by the FGV together with United Nations researchers, using data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics' (IBGE) National Household Sample Survey (PNAD).

According to Néri, this set of factors brought the level of social inequality in Brazil in 2004 down to its lowest level since the 1960 Census. The study indicates that, since the beginning of the decade, the country has made progress in reducing inequalities between rich and poor. One of the findings is that, while income declined 1.35% for Brazilians as a whole between 2001 and 2004, it rose 3.07% among members of the least privileged classes. When the year of 2004 is considered separately, while average income grew 3.6% for Brazilians as a whole, it rose 14.1% among the poorest segments of the population.

As the economist sees it, this decade will be distinguished as the decade of decreased social inequalities, while the decade of the 1990's was marked "by the erradication of the chronic inflation indices and the conquest of universal fundamental education." He also pointed out that "income inequality in Brazil hardly changed over the past 30 years."

He characterized the year of 2004 as "spectacular from the perspective of income distribution, an atypical year in the history of the country, and nowadays the level of inequality in Brazil is the lowest ever in the historical series."

Translation: David Silberstein