Milanovic, Lindert and Williamson (2007) introduced the concept of the inequality possibility frontier. Their starting point is that very poor societies will never display high Gini indexes of personal distribution of income because there is very little surplus to be appropriated by the upper...

This text investigates, for 2004 and 2009, the characteristics and living conditions of four demographic categories defined by household per capita income values. These are the extreme poor (those whose per capita incomes were less than R$ 67 in 2009), the poor (between R$ 67 and R$ 134), the...

This paper aims to describe the ongoing process of regional convergence among Brazilian metropolitan areas and the rest of the country, examining its main reasons and highlighting its importance to the overall decline in income inequality. Our analysis shows that, since the early 1980's, per...