 Education and income distribution in urban Brazil, 1976-1996Francisco Ferreira and Ricardo Paes de Barros Revista CEPAL, 2000 Abstract: Despite tremendous macroeconomic instability, Brazil's urban income distributions in 1976 and 1996 appear, at first glance, deceptively similar. Mean household income per capita was stagnant, with a minute accumulated growth of 4.3% over the two decades. The Gini coefficient hovered just above 0.59 in both years, and the incidence of poverty (with respect to a poverty line of R$60/month at 1996 prices); was effectively unchanged at 22%. Yet, behind this apparent stability, a powerful combination of labour market, demographic and educational dynamics were at work, one effect of which was to generate a substantial increase in extreme urban poverty. Using a micro-simulation-based decomposition methodology which endogenizes labour incomes, individual occupational choices and education decisions, we show that the distribution of incomes was being affected, on the one hand, by a decline in average returns to both education and experience and by impoverishing changes in the structure of occupations and labour force participation (all of which tended to increase poverty);, and on the other hand by an increase in educational endowments across the distribution and a progressive reduction in dependency ratios (both of which tended to reduce poverty);. Date: 2000-08 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ecr:col070:10728 Access Statistics for this article More articles in Revista CEPAL from Naciones Unidas Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL) Contact information at EDIRC. |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.