Income distribution in Brazil

A collection of works that revives the debate surrounding social inequalities in Brazil.

In Brazil, there's much talk about income distribution, but little serious research on the topic. *Income Distribution in Brazil* , edited by José Márcio Camargo and Fabio Giambiagi, brings together the best work the country has produced in recent years on the issue of income distribution. During this period, with the return of democracy, the political passions of the 1970s debates on income concentration in the country gave way to more mature academic reflection, which is reflected in the quality of the work presented here.

In particular, several of the texts explore, using refined statistical techniques, the data mine represented by the IBGE's National Household Sample Survey (PNAD), which provides a full-length portrait of the Brazilian population and its main characteristics, each year, since the end of the sixties.

One result of this exploration is a much deeper understanding, for example, of the interactions between education and income distribution, as presented in the works of Lauro Ramos and José Guilherme de Almeida Reis, the latter and Ricardo Paes de Barros, and Carlos Ivan Simonsen Leal and Sergio Ribeiro da Costa Werlang. The evolution of income distribution in the 1980s; the interaction between income distribution, poverty, and regional inequalities; the roles of the informal and submerged economies; and income distribution in agriculture are the subject of careful analyses by Régis Bonelli and Guilherme Sedlacek, Mauricio Costa Romão, Maria Cristina Cacciamali, and Rodolfo Hoffmann, respectively. The collection concludes with discussions of controversial topics related to wage policy, the functioning of the labor market, and the operation of the financial system, written by João Sabóia, José Márcio Camargo and Edward Amadeo, and Salomão Quadros, respectively.