Unemployment and Poverty in Brazil

Brazil has been struggling with the challenges of unemployment, job inequality, insufficient income from labor and poverty for the past three decades. Although the 1990s and early 2000s showed some economic recovery, raising the expectations that living conditions would be better, conditions have improved very slowly and in some areas worsened. This paper seeks to present an overview of labor market performance in Brazil, how inequality interacts with insufficient income and more specifically its impact and relationship to poverty. It reviews policies and initiatives within a socio-economic context undertaken to address these concerns and the distributional impact of these issues. This paper will also provide analysis of labor trends relative to the challenges of working Brazilian families, issues related to the deterioration of employment conditions, and suggest improvements relative to Brazil’s social, economic and cultural transformation.