A macrodinâmica social brasileira: mudanças, continuidades e desafios

Abstract

Contemporary Brazil is portrayed based on aggregate data on work, employment, income, poverty, and inequality, seeking to establish the recent of the social macrodynamic. To this end, the authors analyze role of the exponential increase of employment, the reduction of unemployment and informalization; real minimum wage increases and the rise of average salaries, the strengthening of Social Security and social programs; the retreat of extreme poverty. This set of data comparatively indicates that, while the Cardoso government turned toward private investment, monetary and fiscal restriction, and state reform (in the “modern” sense of decreasing its size), in the Lula government another perspective of “modernization”: the reinforcement of state capacity to achieve “embedded autonomy”. It concludes that the challenge of modernization is still guided towards redistribution of wealth, the creation of an effective Welfare State and sovereign insertion in the international arena.