“…In several years after the mid-1980s, inflation was higher than 1, OOO per cent a year and successive economic plans to deal with it failed one after the other.4 After a decade of inflation, unemployment, and recession, poverty has grown to alarming dimensions. Recent research has made it clear that the effects of the economic crisis were especially severe for the poor population and reinforced the already iniquitous distribution of wealth in Brazil (Rocha, 1991;Lopes, 1993). Although the Metropolitan Region of SBo Paulo is one of the best placed in the country as far as the distribution of income is concerned, the Gini coefficient grew from 0.516 in 1981 to 0.566 in 1989 (Rocha, 1991, p. 38).5 As a result of this, the last decade marked a reversal of expectations: the belief in progress and social mobility of the previous years was replaced by disillusion, scepticism, and high levels of uncertainty about the future.…”