The objective of this text is to compare various approaches to defining poverty lines. The Cost of Basic Needs approach has been the most widely used method in Brazil and Latin America, there are various alternatives. In addition to the Cost of Basic Needs and Food Energy Intake methods, the...

This text proposes a methodology for classifying the demographic bonus in education into relative and absolute components. According to this definition, a relative demographic bonus means that school age-population is increasing more slowly than total population, making more resources available,...

The following study uses two approaches to judge whether inequality in Brazil is falling fast enough. The first is to compare the variation of the Gini coefficient in Brazil with what was observed in several countries that today belong to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and...

This text decomposes the earnings differential between white men, on the one hand, and black men, white women, and black women, on the other. A difference in earnings may arise due to at least three causes: difference in human capital, different insertions in the labor market, or pure difference...

This discussion paper presents a methodology to visualize the effects of various influences on the income distribution. The methodology, although not new, has become very popular in the past few years. It is the method of counterfactual simulations. In other words, it is the use of "what if …"...