The United Nations Human Development Report analyzed 177 countries and concluded that Brazil ranks eighth (from worst to best) in terms of social inequalities.
The report shows that 46.9% of the Brazilian income is concentrated in the hands of the wealthiest 10% of the population.
“There are only five countries in which the poorest 10% of the population commands a smaller share of national income than poor Brazilians do (0.7%). They are Venezuela and Paraguay (0.6%), and Sierra Leone, Lesotho, and Namibia (0.5%),” the document informs.
First on the list of the world’s most unequal countries, in which income is most unevenly distributed, is Namibia, in Africa, followed by five other African countries: Lesotho, Botswana, Sierra Leone, the Central African Republic, and Swaziland. Seventh place is held by a Central American country, Guatemala.
A country’s degree of social inequality is determined by the Gini coefficient, named after Corrado Gini, the Italian statistician, demographer, and sociologist who developed the index in the early part of the 20th century.
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