This article concerns the need to define poverty in a way to be relevant to the context it is to refer, to be compatible with data availability and to be useful for policy purposes. It discusses the adequacy of concepts to different socioeconomic situations and analyses the two approaches to...

Time and locally specific poverty lines for Brazilian metropolitan areas, which concentrate a third of the country's population, are used for examining the proportion of poor along the short-term cycles, typical of the economic evolution in the 80's. Although the sensibility of poverty to the...

This paper examines the recent experiences of Belém and Belo Horizonte, two metropolitan nuclei where minimum income programs have been implemented. The idea is to verify to which extent the financial conditons in each of these municipalities seem to be compatible with the implementation of the...

Since 1967, when the National Household Survey (PNAD) was created, the investigation of income has been through a series of changes so as to obtain the value of different components of personal income more accurately and thoroughly. Based on the PNAD as it is designed today, this article is...