Despite the recovery of economic growth in Latin America during the 1990s, rising unemployment, high informality rates and sluggish wages lie at the root of high inequality and poverty. This paper looks at changes in hourly earnings from the early 1990s to the early 2000s in three relatively...

Since the mid-1990s, Brazil has undergone extensive reforms that have finally reversed the dismaying economic performance of the 1980s. In particular, poverty and inequality indicators have improved dramatically, especially since the late-2000s. This paper provides an overview of such recent...

This paper presents a critical analysis of income and profit taxes in Brazil, demonstrating how measures adopted in the 1980s and 1990s, as a result of mainstream recommendations, hindered the redistributive role of taxes in the country. Investigation of tax data reveals a high degree of income...

This One Pager presents simulations for the future of non-contributory transfers in Brazil, discussing the dilemmas of various designs and estimating costs and possible impacts on poverty and inequality. The authors also analyse a series of operational and budget-related challenges to...

This paper analyses the pre-tax inequality in the income that individuals actually receive in Brazil and the role of the personal income tax in regulating these incomes. We produce a new distributional series of fiscal income, consistently combining annual and nationally representative household...

This paper uses income tax tabulations to estimate top income shares in Brazil over the long term. Between 1926 and 2015, the concentration of income at the top remained very high, following a sine wave trend: top shares ebbed and flowed over time, frequently in tandem with political and...

Brazil has always been known as a country marked by inequality. Whether of opportunities, income or property, this inequality is manifest in all stages of wealth accumulation. Within this dire landscape, the country has always stood alongside much poorer nations, while countries with similar...

Extreme inequality in Brazil is self-evident. The historian José Murilo de Carvalho emblematically chose to end his book on the history of citizenship in Brazil with the severe diagnosis that 'inequality is the slavery of today, the new cancer that hinders the constitution of a democratic...