Development: On 3 May, Brazil's Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV) reported that poverty had fallen 51% under former president Lula da Silva (2002-2010) and that the country's inequality level has reached a historic low.

Significance: Lula revels in the fact that poverty dropped more under his eight-year administration than under that of his immediate predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2002), when it fell 32%. While the stable, low inflationary macroeconomic environment that Lula inherited from Cardoso laid the foundations for the subsequent period of steady real GDP growth, the FGV directly attributed the reduction in inequality, long a major problem in Brazil, to improved education and the Lula government's wide ranging social policies, of which the direct cash transfer (DCT) scheme Bolsa Família is the best known. 

Key points:

• The minimum wage in Brazil is R$545/mth (US$343/mth). The FGV defines poverty as a per capita income of less than R$151/mth (US$95/mth). It defines extreme poverty as a per capita income of less than R$70/mth (US$44/mth). Some 16.3m Brazilians, or 8.5% of the population, still live in extreme poverty and the government led by President Dilma Rousseff is targeting the elimination of indigence in the country by 2014.  The immediate priority is to get a grip on bubbling inflation, which Rousseff describes as a "plague on the poor".

• Inequality in Brazil is now at its lowest level since it was first measured in the 1960s, and has recovered the ground lost in prior decades. Marcelo Neri, professor of social policy at the FGV, termed the noughties "the decade of inequality reduction", after the 90's "decade of stabilisation".

• The incomes of the poorest 50% rose 68% in December 2000-December 2010. In the same period, the incomes of the wealthiest 10% rose 10%.  The Gini co-efficient, which measures income inequality (on a scale of 1-to-0, with 0 meaning least inequality) is now at 0.5304, better than the Latin American average of about 0.55, but still below the US (0.42). Neri said Brazil would take 30 years to reach US levels and stressed that despite recent improvements, Brazil "still has the same level of schooling as Zimbabwe", and so has a way to go.