Paper short abstract:

This paper compares the pattern of growth and inequality in Brazil and India since the mid 20th century. It considers a variety of economic, social and political institutions and forces, and their impact on labour market inequalities and other aspects of social and economic differentiation.

Paper long abstract:

When considering the long-term pattern of growth and inequality, Brazil and India seem in some ways to be mirror images of each other. In Brazil growth was high in the decades before 1980 and inequality rose, peaking at the end of the 1980s and then declining until the recent crisis. By 2011 it was almost back to the level of 1960. In India, inequality fell from the 1950s to the 1970s, bottomed out and then did not change much for 20 years. But as growth accelerated from the end of the 1990s, inequality started to rise, so that in 2012 it was higher than in the 1950s, and in some respects higher than in Brazil.

These patterns reflect a variety of economic, social and political forces, which need to be examined in terms of both historical processes and structural inequalities in access to resources and labour markets. This presentation adopts a "Regulation School" approach to the institutional configuration of each country in order to interpret these outcomes, and shows how the comparison of the two cases helps to identify and analyse both similarities and differences between them.