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Brazil: The next 10 years
Reducing poverty in the northeast
Looking forward over a 10-year time horizon, one measure of successful development will be the extent to which some of the least developed regions of the country, such as the northeast, can be included in the benefits of economic development. The northeast is made up of the states of Alagoas, Bahia, Ceará, Maranhão, Paraíba, Pernambuco, Piauí, Rio Grande do Norte, and Sergipe. It has an estimated population of 56.9m (2016), representing 27.6% of the national total. Traditionally the imbalance between the industrialised and wealthy southeast and the rural, poorer, northeast led some analysts to describe Brazil as ‘Belindia’, a composite country created by sticking together wealthy Belgium in the south and poor India in the north. The description is a long-standing and possibly over-used cliché first coined before the rise of the Indian middle class, but still captures at least part of the reality.
