Distribuição de renda no Brasil e na Argentina: uma análise comparativa

Abstract

The decade of the 1980's for the Latin American countries has been one of unprecedented decline even in comparison with the 1930's. Not surprisingly, the consequence has been a concentration upon macroeconomic issues at the expense of others. But the high degree of inequality found in Latin America should remain a matter of serious concern, the more so since the supposed negative relationship between macroeconomic performance and the income distribution undergirds much of the opposition to orthodox stabilization policy. In this essay we examine the comparative response of the size distributions in Argentina and Brazil to economic deterioration in the beginning of the 1980's. Such a methodology takes advantage of the available annual income distribution data, and also allows comparison of the responses in an economy whose performance was already stagnating Argentina, with one whose growth rate had been the highest and steadiest in the region, Brazil, This distinction turns out to be a central part of the explanation we offer to the rather different results that emerge in each of the countries. We have found evidence to support the assertion that, in the Brazilian case, the macroeconomic shocks of the early 1980's and the policies they induced, were an important factor explaining the reversal of the improvements in the size distribution of income that took place in the second half of the 1970's. The deterioration in the Argentine size distribution precedes the macroeconomic crisis of the 1980's, although the latter probably deepened the original trend in income inequality.