The article examines the Brazilian Welfare State's main tendencies between the early 1930's and the late 1990's. Comparing the literature on the subject it shows that the distributive characteristics of social policies were affected by an concentrative economic model, by the lack of a wide labor...

The article proposes a simple methodology to build a richness line that depends on the knowledge of the income distribution and the poverty line for a given population. The richness line is justified based on the principle that poverty is morally unacceptable and is defined as the line that...