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The Political Economy of the BRICS Countries


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annual rate of 3.0%. In the subsequent years, it displayed high growth rates in 2008 (5.1%) and 2009 (7.5%).18

Year Relative Gini
1993 0.60
1995 0.60
1997 0.60
1999 0.59
2001 0.59
2003 0.58
2005 0.57
2007 0.55
2009 0.54

      Source: 1993–2007 estimates are from Barros et al. (2010). 2009 estimate is from Ferreira de Souza (2012).

      To the best of my knowledge, the literature on Brazilian inequality has focused upon relative measures (e.g. RG) and ratios of income shares of rich and poor quantiles (e.g. richest 20% to poorest 20%) to estimate inequality. I will therefore (and unlike in the discussion on India in the second section) only discuss relative measures for Brazil. Barros et al. (2010) present the RG of income inequality using the PNAD surveys for the 30-year period 1977–2007. Inequality reached its peak level (about 63%) in 1989 and its lowest level (about 55%) in 2007. In Table 4, I present inequality estimates for the period since 1990s from Barros et al. (2010) and Ferreira de Souza (2012). From this table, it is clear that inequality has been falling steadily since the 1990s, although it continues to be high compared to international standards. Among Latin American countries, Brazil is not unique in this regard. Lopez-Calvo and Lustig (2010, Figure 1-2) consider 17 countries in Latin America and show that during 2000–2006, inequality fell in 12 of them, with Ecuador registering the sharpest fall.

      Several scholars (e.g. Ferreira de Souza, 2012; Soares et al., 2016) have pointed out that poverty has been falling in Brazil in recent times. The Brazilian government has suggested two different thresholds of household per-capita income, one for poverty (100 Real) and the other for extreme poverty (50 Real) (Soares et al., 2016). Both poverty and extreme poverty have decreased sharply. During the period 2004–2013, the former fell by about 14 percentage points (22.4% to 8.9%) and the latter fell by about 4 percentage points (7.6% to 4%) (Soares et al. 2016). Average income has been rising in Brazil since the mid-1990s, particularly since 2003. The mean real income (household income per-capita, in US dollar Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms) grew from $221 in 1995 to $245 in 2003 and then to $372 in 2009 (Ferreira de Souza, 2012, Figure 1). What is more interesting is that the income of all the centiles, including the poor, grew. In fact, the incomes of the poor grew at a much faster rate than those of the middle and richer groups. The growth incidence curve from Ferreira de Souza (2012, Figure 2) has a distinctly downward slope.

      Moving from interpersonal to group-based considerations, Soares et al. (2016) classify Brazilian households into four groups based upon occupations: agricultural, pluriactive, non-agricultural rural, and non-agricultural urban, based upon source of income and official designation (of rural or urban).20 In the early 2000s, the ranking of deprivation of these groups (highest to lowest) was as follows: agricultural, pluriactive, non-agricultural rural, and non-agricultural urban. Soares et al. (2016, Figure 1A) show that poverty has fallen steeply during 2004–2013 for all the groups; except for Pluriactive households, extreme poverty has also fallen for all groups (Soares et al., 2016, Figure 1B). The performance for the most deprived group, agricultural households, is particularly impressive — poverty has fallen from almost 50% to about 25%, and extreme poverty has fallen from about 20% to about 5%. The share of agricultural households has been falling, whereas the share of non-agricultural urban households has been rising (as is expected from the perspective of structural transformation). On the contrary, the shares of Pluriactive and Non-agricultural rural households have been stable (at about 8% and 4%, respectively). Soares et al. (2016) argue that the stability of the share of pluriactive households, combined with the lack of progress in eradicating extreme poverty among them, is a cause for concern and that these households should be the target of specific policies.

      We now move to a comparison of India and Brazil and some explanations for their different performance.

      Comparison and Explanations