Brazil: rapid progress and the challenge of inequality

If one accepts the argument that health is a good measure of how a country is doing socially, then Brazil has come a huge distance. In the 1950s, male life expectancy in Brazil was about 25 years shorter than in the US. In 2014, it was about 6 years shorter. UNDP [1] Human Development Reports are helpful in showing quite how far Brazil has travelled along a path of development. Continuing with life expectancy as a metric of social progress, currently the range, for both sexes, is from 49 in Swaziland to 83.5 in Japan, now pipped by 84 in Hong Kong. On that scale, Brazil at 74.5 is a good deal closer to Japan than it is to Sub-Saharan Africa – 9 years behind Japan, 25 years ahead of the worst in Africa.