Inequalities and the Brazilian New Democracy: Income Distribution Between Classes in Recent Decades

Abstract

The final years of military government in Brazil were marked by a growing expectation that the transition to the democratic regime would be able -or sufficient -to eliminate the main problems afflicting Brazilian society, including poverty, corruption, violence, the quality and reach of public services, inflation, inequalities, and so on (Fausto, 1994). However, the recent literature on Brazil -whether in Sociology, Political Science or Economics, or even the reports circulating in the mass media over recent years -contains strong evidence that, despite the advances achieved in some areas over the last thirty years, many challenges need to be met still for these expectations to become concrete.In this article, I focus specifically on the question of income inequalities, evaluating whether the labour-based income gap between classes in Brazil has shrunk over the last few decades and, if so, how these might be explained.One of the most widely recognized aspects of Brazilian society is its high level of income inequalities, meaning that for many years the country has been ranked among those nations with the highest income disparities in the world (Barros et al., 2001). This phenomenon has already been -and continues to be -widely studied by the specialized literature, which has observed a strong tendency for these inequalities to be reproduced, a trend maintained for decades at a very high level. On the other hand, though still running at a high level, some measures of inequality have begun to fall over recent years. This is the case of the GINI coefficient, for instance, which has fallen continusociol. antropol. | rio de janeiro, v.06.01: 181 -208, abril, 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/2238-38752016v618 182 inequalities and the brazilian new democracy sociol. antropol. | rio de janeiro, v.06.01: 181 -208, abril, 2016 ously over the last decade, reaching the lowest values since it first started to be measured in the country (Barros et al., 2010).These more conventional measures of inequalities, like the GINI index, present a number of limitations, however, which will be discussed more closely over the course of the article. For now I simply observe that they lack the capacity to measure what have become known as 'enduring inequalities' (Tilly, 1999): in other words, the kinds of structured and institutionalized inequalities that tend to be reproduced over the long term and are manifested between socially significant groups and categories. In this article, therefore, I shall analyse the income inequalities between classes -rather than individuals.My interest resides in analysing the pattern of inequalities in labour income between classes in the period from 1995 to 2013. Consequently, the starting point for this study will be the moment following stabilization of the currency (the Plano Real) and also political stabilization, namely the first year of the Fernando Henrique Cardoso government (PSDB), the first directly elected president after the military regime to conclude his mandate. The period analysed will ...

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