Increased income from work and appreciation of the minimum wage reduced disparities in Brazilian cities
The Gini Index, created to measure the degree of income concentration, fell to its lowest historical level in Brazilian metropolises. The indicator, which is based on per capita household income, measures the degree of distribution of this income among individuals in a population, ranging from zero to one. The closer to zero, the lower the inequality.
The data is part of the Inequality in the Metropolises Bulletin, produced by the National Institute of Science and Technology Observatory of the Metropolises, the Laboratory of Inequalities, Poverty and the Labor Market of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul and the Social Debt Observatory Network in Latin America.
According to one of the study coordinators, PUC-RS professor André Salata, 2 factors contributed more significantly to the result: the increase in income obtained from work and the increase in the minimum wage.
“In recent years, we have had a warmer job market, largely recovering from the pandemic, with low unemployment. And also the return of the policy of real appreciation of the minimum wage, which we know makes a difference especially in the lower classes”said the researcher.
“And the country is managing to combine these two factors with inflation control. It is improving for everyone, but it is improving proportionally more for those at the base of the pyramid”added Salata.
As a result, the increase in income was greater among the poorest 40%, going from R$474 per person in 2021 to R$670 in 2024 – which is also a record in the historical series. This helped reduce the poverty rate in these regions, from 31.1% in 2021 to 23.4% in 2023, reaching 19.4% last year. It means that 9.5 million people left the poverty line from 2021 to 2024.
On the other hand, despite having also fallen, the difference between the 2 extremes of the pyramid remains quite significant. Last year, the richest 10% had incomes 15.5 times higher than the poorest 40%.
The professor said that a Gini coefficient above 0.5 is already a very high level of inequality and stated that the poverty rate in metropolises is almost 20%.
“All of this indicates a social situation that is not at all desirable. So, if we just look at the photo, there is nothing to celebrate. Now, when you look at the movement of recent years, that is, the film of recent years, then we have reasons to be a little more happy, and to be a little more optimistic, because it is a movement of improvement, of reducing poverty, of increasing average income”declared the researcher.
The bulletin brings together data from the country’s 20 metropolitan regions (Manaus, Belém, Macapá, Greater São Luís, Fortaleza, Natal, João Pessoa, Recife, Maceió, Aracaju, Salvador, Belo Horizonte, Grande Vitória, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Curitiba, Florianópolis, Porto Alegre, Vale do Rio Cuiabá and Goiânia), Brasília and the integrated administrative development region of Greater Teresina.
“More than 40% of the Brazilian population is in metropolises, which means more than 80 million people. And within our metropolitan regions, we encounter some of the biggest challenges to consolidating citizenship in Brazil, especially for the poorest layers. And when we analyze inequality within these regions, we are talking about the inequality that residents face on a daily basis”Salata said.
With information from .
