“…In fact, these changes have played a decisive role in the improvement of social indicators, such as income concentration, poverty, and welfare. 1 Concisely, income inequality, which had grown steadily between 1960 and 1990 (Barros & Mendonça, 1995), began to decrease remarkably and achieved statistical significance from the second half of the 1990s (Azevedo, 2007 andFigueiredo &Ziegelmann, 2009), resulting in the improvement of poverty and pauperism rates (Ramos & Santana, 2003).…”