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...

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...

We examine the extent to which education is a main determinant of affluence in Brazil. We focus on workers in the top 1% of the labor earnings distribution. We use university courses data from the Sample Questionnaire of the 2010 Census. Our main conclusion is that while education may be...

Using data from the Brazilian Census 2000 we estimate whether the distribution of the eligible population of the Continuous Cash Benefit (BPC) would change after a modification in definition of family used to calculate family per capita income. Our results show that in 2000 the majority of...

The study examines a particular set of institutional determinants of inequality, the public pensions. It tests the hypothesis that different rules regarding a maximum limit for the value of benefits in the pension subsystem of public and private sector workers makes the system as a whole...

Using a factor decomposition of the Gini coefficient we measure the contribution to inequality of direct monetary transfers to and from the Brazilian State. Among the transfers from the State are wages of public workers, pensions and social assistance; the transfers to the State are direct taxes....