Social Indicators by Race, Ethnicity, and Social Background: Brazil, India, the United States

Abstract

ew nations of the world collect national economic and social data broken down by race and ethnicity, and this absence is particularly striking in the vast statistical collections of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Nevertheless, three of the world’s five most populous nations—India (1.2 billion), the United States (311 million), and Brazil (192 million), make efforts in this area. The statistical record indicates that income and labor market conditions are significantly stratified by racial and ethnic backgrounds in these nations. While there are examples of racial and ethnic minorities who outperform the dominant majority or traditional power bloc in these democracies, the available statistics paint a grim picture, showing dramatically higher poverty and unemployment levels for those belonging to certain racial and ethnic classifications. Often at the apex of income inequality in the world, Brazil has watched notable shrinkage during the Lula years in its Gini coefficient, the most widely used measure of disparities of wealth and income. But the stratification remains enormous. Whites still earn double the income of black/brown workers, though for the university-educated black/brown population the salary gap is narrower, approximately 15 percent less than for university-educated whites. Since the late 1970s, the United States has seen remarkable leaps of inequality under both Democrat and Republican regimes, though African Americans had made striking gains between the 1940s and the mid-1970s. India classifies many of its different peoples with categories that sound archaic and offensive in the postmodern and politically correct circles of the contemporary West: “Scheduled Castes” (SC), “Scheduled Tribes” (ST), and “Other Backward Classes”