Human Development Indicators (HDI) as an instrument for measuring ethnic inequalities: the case Brazil

Abstract

 
  Study on Development Indicators Humano, carried out by professor Marcelo Paixão, from the Institute of Economics at UFRJ, and the Coordination of Afro-Brazilian Observatory, showed the
high degree ofinequality between blacks and whites in the country. You Human Development Indicators,
HDI, were developed by the United Nations Program for the Development (UNDP), and classify the 174
countries of the world within a ranking. This ranking, an indicator synthetic, aggregates three basic
variables: per capita income, longevity and literacy combined with the rate of schooling. By this index,
Brazil would be placed in 74th in the UNDP ranking and would be framed as a country with a medium human
development index. O work developed consisted of applying the same UNDP methodology to measure disparities
between white and afro-descendant ethnic groups - considering blacks and blacks as Afro-descendants browns in Brazil. The databases used were the from the National Household Sampling Survey (PNAD) from 1998.