Economic Inequality In Brazil

Countries around the world, especially developing ones, run into the crippling dilemma of poverty and how the issue of inequality should be handled. Some countries continue to exacerbate the issue through extractive and vicious processes, others acknowledge it and set out to solve it in different ways. Brazil, a victim of the debt crisis in the 1980s and a deficit economy that sets back its people, has experienced economic inequality from the very beginning of the state’s independence. The question of how Brazil has helped the impoverished is a story of overcoming history’s burdensome shackles and unfolding social change. This paper looks at Brazil’s divisive past and how history’s repercussions have throttled Brazil’s lower classes. Next, …show more content…
There three subpoints to this. The first is slavery. During Europe’s colonialization of Brazil and usage of slavery, the institutions were extremely extractive, using the slaves as a means to an end to benefit their slavers . After abolition, the institutions failed to facilitate personal development for the slaves. This meant that the state failed to invest in this section of people, leaving them with no education and no job training. These people often were left to live in poor areas with poorly invested in schools as well, preventing students the ability to pursue better and higher education in their lives and shuts them out of better opportunities. Second, concentration of authority and power. Initially, the state was heavily centralized before 1889. This prevented public and infrastructure investment and widened the regional inequality and the distribution of goods. The switch from centralism was met with equally excessive federalism. Social policy and education were then left up to the states, and due to the regional inequality created by centralism, federalism was set up to worsen inequalities as the richer southern states could afford to funnel more money into schools whereas the North and West fell behind. Third, weak institutions had difficulty properly enforcing rights. These included the failure to enforce legal codes, judicial protections, and human, property, and civil rights. Even police brutality occurs at an alarm right . All three of …show more content…
There are two primary arguments used against the program. First, there was the concern of the impoverished becoming dependent upon the government for cash. Second, the worry of the poor not knowing how to allocate resources well, thus policymakers knew what the poor needed the most. This last criticism quite ignorant because it assumes that the poor would blow all their money on drugs, alcohol, and other wasteful items. For the former criticism, analysis shows that there is simply no evidence of a culture of dependence, and that to prove such there needs to be “broad and pervasive influences across many different values, beliefs and attitudes” . For the latter, this is completely unreasonable. Lula and his advisers knew that these arguments ignorant, for Lula himself knew them to be false. In the 1990s, Cardoso tried an anti-poverty program that would distribute goods in the past, but this was extremely complicated and required a bureaucracy that was prone to corruption. Not only that, but it was extremely inefficient and expensive. Additionally, Lula, having been raised from a very poor family, knew that the poor would spend responsibly and use it on goods that they truly need, especially when it was given to mothers . Indeed, Edward Glaeser, a professor of economics at Harvard University, confirms that cash