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Inequality and Well-Being in the Brazilian Metropolitan Areas

Raphael Villela Almeida, Max Plack Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) and Escola Nacional de Ciências Estatísticas (ENCE/IBGE)
César Augusto Marques Silva, Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP)

Rising inequalities are one of the current dynamics threating social wellbeing. Among the richest countries, those with more equitable income distribution presents better quality of life. Demographically, these places tend to be migrants inclusive, have greater longevity and to be human rights oriented. Considering this scenario, this paper focus on Brazilian inequalities to explore how more equal areas benefits its population wellbeing. As Brazil is considered an extremely unequal country, their different regions present a wide range of wealth, poverty and inequality levels. In this analysis we compare Brazilian metropolitan areas to indicate how inequality imposes limitations to development and wellbeing. We analyze data from Brazilian National Household Sample Survey, from IBGE, to correlate both wellbeing and inequality levels. Our main results indicates that central development dynamics, as education, unemployment and illiteracy rate, access to sewage drainage system, housing shortage, infant mortality, traffic related death rate and homicide rate were correlated with inequalities, as measured by the 10th/1st decile share ratio (DSR).

Keywords: Inequality, Urbanization and urban populations

See paper.

  Presented in Session 132. The Determinants of Urban Inequality