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...

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...

The objective of this paper is to estimate the length of poverty spells and its determinants. We analyze if short-term changes in the labor market affect the probability of staying in poverty. On the assumption that poverty transitions occur more frequently when we use a monthly data rather than...

This paper aims to explain the immediate causes of per capita income growth, the decline in income inequality and poverty reduction in five different geographic regions - Brazil, the Northeastern region, the state of Bahia, the metropolitan area of Salvador and nonmetropolitan areas of Bahia -...

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 study aimed to identify the major factors underlying the large discrepancy in poverty levels between two Brazilian racial groups: whites and Afro-Brazilians. We performed an Oaxaca-Blinder-type decomposition for nonlinear regressions in order to quantify the extent to which differences in...