In Brazil, black and brown people have a greater loss of quality of life than whites

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The Quality of Life Loss Index (IPQV) in Brazil was 0.158 between 2017 and 2018. This multidimensional index was presented today (26) for the first time by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) in Rio de Janeiro.

It represents another dimension of the 2017-2018 Household Budget Survey (POF), now bringing the Quality of Life Indicators.

The new indicators follow United Nations (UN) recommendations and use several variables from the 2017-2018 survey. The measures range from zero to one, with the closer to zero, the lower the loss.

The IPQV considers 50 indicators relating to housing, utilities, food and health, education, access to financial services and standard of living, leisure, and transportation.

The IPQV for black and brown people is 0.185, and for white people, 0.123: “When the population subgroups are defined by family characteristics, in the cases in which the reference person declared themself white, the IPQV value was 0.123, notably lower than the Brazilian value. For the part of the population where the reference person declared himself as black or brown, the IPQV was 0.185, i.e., 17% higher than the national value,” informed the IBGE.

Complete higher education
The index of the loss of quality of life for those who have completed higher education is much lower than those who have no education. “When we consider schooling, the main highlight is in the subgroup with an uneducated reference person, in which the IPQV was 0.255, that is, 1.6 times the overall Brazilian value. In the subgroup with a reference person with a complete college education, the index was 0.076, less than half of the overall Brazilian value,” revealed the survey.

Families whose reference person was a man presented the least loss in quality of life, with an IPQV of 0.151, against 0.169 in families led by women.

The group with the most negligible loss of quality of life concentrated 13.7% of the population, and the group with the most casualties, 10.3%. Most Brazilians are in the intermediate zone of quality of life.

The loss was more significant in rural areas than the national average (1.5 times more) than in urban areas (1.7 times more). About 15% of Brazilians lived in rural areas, and this portion of the population contributed almost a quarter of the Brazil IPQV.

“Regarding the geographical strata, in the rural area, the IPQV was 0.246, i.e., about 1.5 times the value for Brazil. As far as large regions are concerned, South (0.115) and Southeast (0.127) had a lower IPQV than the national, while North (0.225) and Northeast (0.209) had the highest results for this index,” said the survey.

Economic performance
A second index measuring socioeconomic performance was also released today for the first time. The Socioeconomic Performance Index (SDI) incorporates income and quality of life losses across nine dimensions (income, housing, access to utilities, health, education, access to financial services and standard of living, food, transportation, and leisure and travel).

In the period analyzed by the 2017-2018 survey, Brazil’s SDI was 6.201. The Federal District (6.970) and São Paulo (6.869) had the highest indices, and Maranhão (4.897) and Pará (5.099), the lowest. [10 is the highest possible rank.]

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