Health and Education

To those familiar with the living conditions of Brazil's population it will come as no surprise that the income distribution in this country is one of the worst in the world. Recent reports indicate that almost all African, Asian, and Latin American countries have more equitable income distributions. A relatively high income per capita tends to obscure the poverty and the precarious health conditions in which the majority of the working population lives. The concentration of wealth in Brazil necessarily has as its counterpart the world's third-lowest minimum salary. As a result, diseases that had been eradicated are now returning to the country, and the number of street people, many of them small children, is increasing in cities in which the favela (shantytown) has been considered a solution for those who have no place to live. In this article I seek to highlight some of the causes of this situation and to describe the expression of this crisis in one industrial sector of the country's secondlargest city, Rio de Janeiro. I discuss a research project undertaken by a group of university researchers and teachers on these questions and show how the investigative activities have grown into an action plan that involves community leaders and other professionals as well

Demographic economics · Development economics · Distribution (mathematics) · Economic growth · Economics · Latin Americans · Per capita income · Political science · Population · Poverty · Salary · Socioeconomics · Sociology · Surprise · Demography · Rural Development and Agriculture · Urban Development and Societal Issues · Youth, Drugs, and Violence

• The politics of social service provision through NGOs

  Open Access•Jasmine Gideon•Bulletin of Latin American Research•1998

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• Education Funding in a Recentralizing Democracy

  Open Access•Joseph C Sands•Latin American Politics and Society•2008

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