Neil Turner 
Unemployment and Poverty in Brazil 

Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2012 in the subject Ethnology / Cultural Anthropology, grade: none, , language: English, abstract: Brazil has been struggling with the challenges of unemployment, job inequality, insufficient income from labor and poverty for the past three decades. Although the 1990s and early 2000s showed some economic recovery, raising the expectations that living conditions would be better, conditions have improved very slowly and in some areas worsened. This paper seeks to present an overview of labor market performance in Brazil, how inequality interacts with insufficient income and more specifically its impact and relationship to poverty. It reviews policies and initiatives within a socio-economic context undertaken to address these concerns and the distributional impact of these issues. This paper will also provide analysis of labor trends relative to the challenges of working Brazilian families, issues related to the deterioration of employment conditions, and suggest improvements relative to Brazil’s social, economic and cultural transformation.

About the author

Neil Turner is an American anthropologist living in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. He holds a Ph.D. and a M.A. in Anthropology. While in the USA, Dr. Turner worked as a research analyst for the American College of Physicians (1992 – 2002), and he has worked as a computer information technician for the oldest law practice in the United States, Rawle & Henderson (2005 – 2007). As a professor, he has taught at Tufts University, Boston, MA., California State University, Los Angeles, CA and as an adjunct professor at American Pathways University, Denver, CO. Dr. Turner has authored several papers and his work has been published by Grin Publishers, Munich, Germany. Also, his work has appeared in the Italian online journal for anthropology, Antrocom. Currently, he is teaching ESL, TOEFL, developing educational software for the computer and conducting ethnographic research for a book on Brazil.