World Bank report takes shine off Brazil’s Golden Decade

A recent World Bank report has shone a light on the variations in poverty rates across Latin America since the early 2000s, making for troubling reading for Brazil. It shows that the country’s poverty rate increased 3 percent between 2014 and 2017, and its underwhelming growth figures signal that this negative trend will continue.

The report places Brazil’s 2017 poverty rate at 21 percent, meaning that over one-fifth of the population lived on less than USD 5.50 per day two years ago. Rates of extreme poverty (less than USD 1.90 per day) sat at 5 percent, representing some 10 million Brazilians—the equivalent of the entire population of Portugal.

The increase in poverty levels came at the end of what the World Bank calls the “Golden Decade”—the period of 2003 to 2014 where commodity prices were extremely high and levels of monetary poverty dropped some 20 percentage points across Latin America as...