blog： Brazil’s Shrinking Wealth Gap

Finding good news in the global financial crisis takes dedication and a microscope, but a small light now shines from an unlikely place at an even more unlikely time. It’s one of the givens of development that general economic woe is the enemy of the poor, who are, by definition, society’s weakest link. All the more so in a global economic meltdown that has, in a matter of months, erased decades of savings, destroyed jobs, and reversed poverty alleviation across the world. Now Brazil, known for its gnawing poverty, may be challenging this grim rule.

It’s not that the last are now first. But the distance between the penthouse and the poorhouse in one of the developing world’s most skewed societies has stopped growing and, by optimistic measures, may even be shrinking. Recent numbers from the Brazilian economy show that, thanks to a surprisingly resilient internal market and aggressive government stimulus spending, the poor have fared less miserably in the recession than might have expected and less terribly in Brazil than elsewhere.

Tags: Wealth