Good morning! Today, new studies show Brazil has made little progress in narrowing its vast inequality gap. Palm oil production not as ‘green’ as once promised. Good news and bad for Bolsonaro in recent polls.
Extreme levels of inequality continue to define Brazil
The World Inequality Report 2022 — written by economists Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman — shows that wealth inequality continues to be a defining feature of Brazilian society.
- In Brazil, the bottom 50 percent earns 29 times less than the top 10 percent. As a comparison, that same ratio is 7 in France. “In Brazil and South Africa, the top 1 percent wealth share was extreme in the 1990s, and is still extreme today,” says the report.
- In terms of wealth, half of the population owns less than 0.5 percent of financial and non-financial assets in Brazil.
- The report corroborates other data on wealth inequality. Per NGO Oxfam International, it would take 19 years for a Brazilian on the minimum wage to earn as much as the top 0.1 percent makes every month.
Perspective. Historical data shows that cash-transfer policies such as successive raises to the minimum wage and the Bolsa Família...