The Distribution of Household Income in Brazil: Unequal and Immutable?

SummaryAfter a period of rapid growth in the 1970s, a macroeconomically turbulent decade of the 1980s, the achievement of price stability during the 1990s, and an impressive expansion of educational opportunities, long term trends do not show an unambiguous increase or decline in Brazilian household income inequality. However, behind the apparently invariable state of affairs one finds a marked decline in the proportion of households with incomes below 1.5 times the poverty line. The use of a semi-parametric procedure for constructing counterfactual income densities establishes that while advances in education were almost wholly associated with growth in absolute incomes, they had little impact on their dispersion.