.Poverty, Social Mobility, Non-Whites, Brazil

Rafael Guerreiro Osorio

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Research Papers in Economics

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United Nations Development Programme
Has there been any Social Mobility
for Non-Whites in Brazil?
   January, 2007          Number  27
by Rafael Guerreiro Osorio
International Poverty Centre
Studies on social mobility often assume that as societies
modernize, the socio-economic position of individuals will become
attributable less to their ascribed characteristics, such as class, lineage,
gender or race, and more to their own individual achievements,
such as those based on ability, talent or effort. In other words, the
characteristics of a child’s family or other circumstances beyond
his control will have increasingly less influence in determining
his own eventual socio-economic status.
Such studies usually focus on individuals; they rarely examine
the mobility of groups. It is possible that while individuals from
disadvantaged backgrounds, such as non-whites, could enjoy
greater social mobility, the relative position of the group to which
they belong could change little. This could happen, for example, if
individuals exchange positions exclusively with other members of
their own group. Thus, a poorer non-white could achieve upward
mobility at the same time that a richer non-white suffered from
downward mobility. Alternatively, a poorer non-white could
exchange positions with a slightly richer white but both would still
have below-average incomes.
We test this proposition for racial groups in Brazil. Slavery was
abolished in Brazil only in 1888. Until then, race was a powerful
determinant of one’s social position. At the top of society were
Portuguese settlers and their offspring. In the middle were other
white Brazilians of European descent and free people of mixed
ethnicity. In the lower echelons were natives and enslaved Africans.
Although all the legal grounds for such stratification have now
been eliminated in Brazil, people of African descent and other
non- whites remain over-represented among the poor. Race remains
a very important determinant of stratification, especially if the
relative status of groups, not merely individuals, is examined.
In order to examine this claim, we choose the distribution of
household income per person as a marker of social stratification.
First, we divide the total population into twenty equal shares –
vintiles – ranked from the poorest five per cent (first vintile) to the
richest five per cent (twentieth vintile). We use Brazilian National
Household Surveys as our data source for the period 1976 to 2005.
However, we can compare income and race for only 19 out of the
total of 26 survey rounds carried out during this period.
For each of these rounds, we calculate twenty ‘odds-ratios’, namely,
the odds that a non-white person (either Afro-Brazilian or of mixed
ethnicity) could be found in a particular vintile (such as the poorest
5 per cent) versus the overall odds that a person could be non-white.
These ratios are normalized to range between -1 and +1. If the ratio is
close to -1, the likelihood of finding such a non-white person in that
vintile is very small; conversely, if the ratio is close to +1, there is a
high likelihood of finding him there.
The results of this exercise are shown in the chart. For each vintile,
denoted on the horizontal axis, there are 19 observations (although
they overlap on the graph). For non-whites, the probabilities of being
in the poorer vintiles over the course of 30 years are consistently
positive, and for the richer vintiles consistently negative.
In other words, non-whites, as a group, have experienced very little
social mobility. A simple regression, depicted by the line drawn through
the data points, explains a remarkably high 97 per cent of all variance
over the 30 years. This implies, for example, that no matter where a
poverty line is set, non-whites would remain concentrated among
the poor.
Our conclusion is that the socio-economic position of non-whites
has remained remarkably stable and predictable over a long period
of time. If race had not indeed remained an important determinant of
socio-economic position, one would expect non-whites to have
become more upwardly mobile, even if only slowly, over the last
30 years. But the available evidence suggests that there has been
practically no upward mobility for this group.
Reference:
1. Rafael Guerreiro Osorio, Race and Social Mobility in Brazil. Paper presented at the Workshop
 “Equity and Social Mobility”, IPC - DRCLAS, Brasilia, Brazil, January 2007.
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Race and Social Mobility in Brazil. Paper presented at the Workshop “Equity and Social Mobility”, IPC - DRCLAS,

Has there been any Social Mobility for Non-Whites in Brazil?

http://www.ipc-undp.org/pub/IPCOnePager27.pdf

Has there been any Social Mobility for Non-Whites in Brazil?

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