Discuss the Progress Made in Poverty Alleviation in a Developing Country of Your Choosing over the Past 30-40 Years

Discuss the progress made in poverty alleviation in a developing country of your choosing over the past 30-40 years.

Brazil is the fifth largest country in the world, both by population with 193 million people and by geographical area with 8,515,767 square kilometers(Wikipedia). It is one of the world’s fastest growing economies and it is the seventh largest by nominal GDP and the seventh by purchasing power parity .Although the country is an international power , poverty is widespread in Brazil. Despite being a middle-income country with lots of natural resources, the level of poverty in rural regions is similar to that of the poorest countries in Latin America.More than 35 % of the population lives in poverty with less than two dollars a day and 51 % of the population in rural areas lives under the poverty line. Statistical institutions like the Brazilian Institute of Statistics and Geography (IBGE) with the help of The World Bank have provided statistical measurements of poverty in Brazil and have acknowledged the progress made in poverty alleviation over the past 30-40 years.

Poverty is traditionally measured through monetary measures of income and consumption through national surveys.The most frequent surveys performed by the IBGE – PNAD and PME provide information on income and employment while the POFs provide more complete information on income, expenditures and consumption. Consumption is acknowledged as the more accurate measurements of poverty because it fluctuates less in the short-run than income, it suffers less from measurement errors , income has a strong life-cycle pattern and because income is more vulnerable to under-reporting by respondents. There have been numerous surveys such as the POF 2002-03 and the 1996/7 PPV(Living Standards Measurement Survey) ,however, there is not an official poverty line , rather a wide range of poverty lines – the Administrative Poverty lines ,the International Poverty lines and Consumption-Based...