Dear Moldowin
It is more complicated than that. Public access to the internet is
certainly not as frequent here as in Canada. Additionally, a public library
is possibly the last place where you would find poor people in Brazil. Of
course exceptions exist.
To give you an idea of the educational gap that comes with poverty here,
look at the table describing educational level in 1996. We are possibly a
little bit better now, but numbers tell just a part of the story.
Ecconomically active Non-ecconomically active
Total (1) 1 960 871 1 273 290 687 581
Don't read or write 345 373 194 050 151 323
Some reading and writing 195 632 110 970 84 662
1 to 3 years of school 314 713 212 248 102 465
4 years school 323 812 223 523 100 289
5 to 8 years school 291 569 220 160 71 409
9 to 12 years school(high school) 125 608 89 805 35 803
college 40 748 32 045 8 704
master and phd 1 582 1 385 198
Does not know 321 834 189 104 132 729
Source - IBGE, 1996.
I believe that this is a very important issue.What do we mean by
poverty in distinct countries? And what do we mean by inequality?
If we look at the income distribution in England and Canada, when we
say inequality possibly we are talking about the difference in income (and
other social conditions) between both extremes of the income curve, that is
clearly a curve representing just one population. In Brazil and several
other countries, we have clearly two populations, two separated curves witha
gap between them, one small, with average income which corresponds to the
level of middle class UK citizens, and another one, huge, far distant to the
left in the X axis. The gap would be filled by salaries of skilled workers,
which we don't have (most of the school teachers belong to the poorer
population). Figures in the work in this link show this clearly.
http://www.g7.utoronto.ca/g20/20030403_poverty_income.pdf
Other important issue is the absolute size of the poor population.
Social services possibly can do a good job when they have to rescue a few
thousant people from misery. But what could they do when the poor are 40
million individuals? (and I am using a cut point possibly very different
form the one you would use!)
Poverty and inequality can not be addressed without contextualization.
This was what my comment was about.
Regards,
Maria Inês Azambuja, MD
Brazil
----- Original Message -----
From: "D. Moldowin" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, September 06, 2008 3:05 PM
Subject: Re: [SDOH] Podcasts - Stories of Poverty in the First Person
> Marie,
>
> Access to the internet is available at libraries, for free, throughout
> Canada. Is it not the same in Brazil?
>
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