Interpreting Brazilian income distribution trends

Abstract

In his long career teaching so many of us to ask the important questions about the Brazilian economy, Werner Baer has often focused on its unequal distribution of income. The persistence of inequality for so much of its history has troubled him, as it has so much of the Brazilian economics profession. It would be optimistic to think that we will soon have much better answers or better policies than we currently do, but surely an important step on that journey begins by asking the right questions. Werner’s intellectual style has always been to look at the actual numbers, rather than try to extract some delicate hypotheses from a theoretical model.