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Economy

In Booming Brazil, Census Shows Income Gap Persists

Brazil’s richest 10% earn in one month what the poorest 10% make in more than three years. To find out how much the richest 1% earn, multiply that figure by three, according to the South American giant’s latest census numbers.

Brazil's poorest 10% earns on average $76 per month
Brazil's poorest 10% earns on average $76 per month

SAO PAOLO – Brazil is a nation on the rise, with a fast-growing economy and preparations under way to host both the World Cup and Olympic Games. But its just published 2010 census also shows a country that still struggles with serious income disparity, with the country's wealthiest 10% earn 39 times more than the poorest 10%.

According to the Brazilian daily Estadao, a worker on the bottom end of Brazil's pay scale earns roughly $77.40 per month, meaning it would take him or her three years and three months to earn what an average person at the top end of the spectrum makes in just one month: $3,019.

Brazil's Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) – the research organization responsible for the census – estimates that together, the poorest 10% of the population bring in just 1.1% of the country's total earnings. The richest 10%, in contrast, take home 44.5% of the overall income pie. Last year's census also revealed that Brazil's richest 1% earn an average of $9,359.39 per month – or roughly $112,000 per year.

The statistics take into account 101.8 million Brazilians over the age of 10. The country's overall average monthly salary is $678.90. Brazil's official minimum wage in 2010 was $288 per month – less than $10 per day. Incomes tend to be higher in the south and southeast areas of the country. The coastal city of Florianápolis boasted the country's highest average income: $888.5 per month.

For the first time, the 2010 census complied information about Brazilians living abroad. Researchers asked residents whether they have family members living in foreign countries and if so, where. The IBGE found that United States to be the most popular destination for Brazilian emigrants (23.8%), followed by Portugal (13.4%), Spain (9.4%) and Japan (7.4%).

Read the original article in Spanish

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Ideas

Shame On The García Márquez Heirs — Cashing In On The "Scraps" Of A Legend

A decision to publish a sketchy manuscript as a posthumous novel by the late Gabriel García Márquez would have horrified Colombia's Nobel laureate, given his painstaking devotion to the precision of the written word.

Photo of a window with a sticker of the face of Gabriel Garcia Marquez with butterfly notes at Guadalajara's International Book Fair.

Poster of Gabriel Garcia Marquez at Guadalajara's International Book Fair.

Juan David Torres Duarte

-Essay-

BOGOTÁ — When a writer dies, there are several ways of administering the literary estate, depending on the ambitions of the heirs. One is to exercise a millimetric check on any use or edition of the author's works, in the manner of James Joyce's nephew, Stephen, who inherited his literary rights. He refused to let even academic papers quote from Joyce's landmark novel, Ulysses.

Or, you continue to publish the works, making small additions to their corpus, as with Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett and Clarice Lispector, or none at all, which will probably happen with Milan Kundera and Cormac McCarthy.

Another way is to seek out every scrap of paper the author left and every little word that was jotted down — on a piece of cloth, say — and drip-feed them to publishers every two to three years with great pomp and publicity, to revive the writer's renown.

This has happened with the Argentine Julio Cortázar (who seems to have sold more books dead than alive), the French author Albert Camus (now with 200 volumes of personal and unfinished works) and with the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. The latter's posthumous oeuvre is so abundant I am starting to wonder if his heirs haven't hired a ghost writer — typing and smoking away in some bedsit in Barcelona — to churn out "newly discovered" works.

Which group, I wonder, will our late, great novelist Gabriel García Márquez fit into?

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