FA - Brazils Antipoverty Breakthrough

8/17/2019 FA - Brazils Antipoverty Breakthrough

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JONATHAN TEPPERMAN is Managing Editor

of Foreign Affairs and the author of the

forthcoming book Survival of Nations: HowCountries Thrive in an Age of Decline. Followhim on Twitter @j_tepperman.

I N E Q U A L I T Y

largest nation had long been among themost unequal places on earth, a statesynonymous with savage social injustice.The country may have been blessed

with a large, youthful population andabundant natural resources, but for along time, Brazil did as bad a job spread-ing its wealth as could be imagined. Eventiny, benighted Haiti was more equal.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Brazil movedfrom dictatorship to democracy andembraced structural reforms that finallybrought hyperinflation under control.

But the mass o the population remainedtrapped in rural penury or urban favelas,while the fortunate few soared over thecountry’s ungovernable megacities inprivate helicopters. At the turn o themillennium, about a third o Brazil’spopulation languished beneath theinternational poverty line (survivingon $2 a day), and about 15 percent wasindigent (living on less than $1.25 a day).

Since then, however, a peacefulrevolution has occurred. By 2011, theBrazilian economy was growing at arespectable four percent a year andunemployment had hit a record low—and for once, the benefits were actuallybeing widely shared. In the first decadeo the new century, some 40 millionBrazilians moved from poverty into

the middle class, per capita householdincome shot up by 27 percent, andinequality dropped dramatically—unlikein every other country (Russia,India, and China), where it rose. Today,Brazil still faces many challenges, from aneconomic downturn to corruption scan-dals to the end o the commodity boom.But the country’s incredible success in

reducing poverty and inequality can andshould light the way for further progress,both there and abroad.

Brazil’s Antipoverty

Breakthrough The Surprising Success ofBolsa Família

Jonathan Tepperman

In recent years, as public anxiety over

growing inequality has intensified,policymakers and academics havestarted scrambling for some increasinglyextreme solutions. India, for example,has launched massive programs to pro-vide the poor with food and jobs, andthe French economist Thomas Pikettyhas famously proposed a redistributiveglobal wealth tax.

But there are big problems with

such efforts. Huge, heavily bureaucraticprograms such as India’s have proved inef-ficient and expensive. And the planet’srichest citizens are certain to use all theirinfluence to block any proposals alongPiketty’s lines from being implemented.

The good news is that these and otherradical solutions are also unnecessary.Over the last dozen years or so, one

country—Brazil—has shown that there’sa far better, less provocative, and moremarket-friendly way to fight inequality.

Not long ago, the idea that Brazilmight have something to teach the worldabout reducing inequality would havesounded like a joke. Latin America’s

avanço


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Brazil’s Antipoverty Breakthrough

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THE RISE OF THE REVOLUTIONARY

The urbane Fernando Henrique Cardoso,Brazil’s president from 1995 to 2003,started his career as a leftist academic

but governed the country as a centrist.So when, during the 2002 presidentialcampaign, it started to look as thoughhe would soon be succeeded by LuizInácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s elites andmarkets panicked.

Lula, as he is universally known, hasattained such iconic status today that itcan be hard to remember just how scary

he seemed—at least to the rich—whenhe first burst onto Brazil’s political scene.A proud child o the country’s destitutenortheast, Lula had been born the seventho eight children in the hardscrabblestate o Pernambuco. His family wasso hard up that the future president wasforced to drop out o school after thesecond grade in order to make moneyshining shoes. At ten, he taught himsel

to read. At 14, Lula somehow workedhis way into a factory, where he eventu-ally lost his left pinky finger to a machinepress. Then he got involved in Brazil’spowerful labor movement and discov-ered his calling. Rising rapidly throughthe ranks o the São Bernardo do CampoMetalworkers’ Union, Lula became theorganization’s leader at age 30, and five

years later—while the country was stillruled by a military dictatorship—hehelped found the leftist Workers’ Party() in order to give the downtroddena voice on the national stage.

By 2002, Lula had already run forpresident—and lost—three times.Although he had never been a Marxist(unlike many o his comrades), his

earlier campaigns had featured calls tonationalize industry and default on thecountry’s debt. When he finally started

climbing in the polls, such talk, alongwith his rough roots and his campaignpromise to eradicate poverty within ageneration, thoroughly spooked elites

and investors at home and abroad. Inthe United States, Henry Hyde, theRepublican chair o the House Interna-tional Relations Committee, denouncedhim as a “pro-Castro radical.” GoldmanSachs began publishing a “Lulameter”that purported to track the risks toinvestors should the win. Nervousforeign banks started cutting off credit.

Brazil’s fragile economy, which was juststarting to pick up, went into a dive. Themain stock index fell by 30 percent.Investors started dumping their Brazilianholdings, yanking more than $12 billionin capital out o the country within afew months. And the value o the real,Brazil’s currency, fell by 40 percent againstthe dollar, hitting an all-time low towardthe end o 2002.

Yet enough Brazilians were sick othe country’s feudal social structure andthe pain caused by Cardoso’s necessarybut unpopular structural reforms andausterity measures that Lula won any-way. As the unkempt union man pre-pared to take office and the economycontinued to crater, the country bracedfor the epic confrontation. But the

cataclysm never arrived.Although Lula did enter office plotting

a revolution, it was nothing like the onehis conservative critics feared. His earlierdefeats and the vicious reaction to hiseventual victory hadn’t weakened Lula’scommitment to social change, but theyhad made him rethink how to producethat change. Between 1993 and 2001,

he and José Graziano, an American-born agronomist who was one o Lula’sclosest advisers, had gone on extensive


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CASH AND CARRY

At the same time that Lula was wooingthe moneymen, however, he was hard atwork on another front, preparing to use

his growing political capital to launchan ambitious new social welfare campaign.Rolled out a few months after his election,Fome Zero (Zero Hunger) eventuallyfeatured more than 40 different programsrun by close to 20 government ministries.But one initiative stood at the campaign’score: Bolsa Família (Family Grant), apoverty-fighting effort that was revolu-

tionary in its size, ambition, and design.Rather than provide the poor withgoods or services, as most developmentprograms did at the time, Bolsa Famíliawould do something far more daring:simply hand out money. Brazil hadactually started experimenting with thisapproach back in 1995, when the citieso Campinas and Brasília had launchedsmall cash-giveaway programs on a trial

basis. These proved so effective thatthey were soon copied by more than100 other local governments, and in2001, Cardoso had begun testing asimilar scheme on the national level(although the payments were tiny andthe execution was flawed). Lula, actingon Graziano’s advice, decided to rollall these various programs into a single

new streamlined national initiative andto expand it to a scale far larger than evenmost experts had ever imagined possible.

The idea proved hugely controversial,at least at first. At the time, most expertsand international organizations stillconsidered the notion o simply handingmoney straight to the poor to be danger-ously wrong-headed. It just felt wrong on

an intuitive level. It also flew in the faceo decades o social science research andwhat the World Bank had long consid-

listening tours throughout the country,and the politician who emerged was farmore moderate, conciliatory, and politi-cally canny than his earlier incarnation.

Lula had realized that he would never getfar i he tried to govern on behal o justpart o Brazil. He needed to ensure thathis revolution would benefit everyone.

And so the rabble-rouser metamor-phosed into the Great Conciliator. Lulabanished all talk o debt defaults andwealth redistribution from his lexicon,recasting himsel as what the Rio-based

journalist Mac Margolis has called “the-whisperer, amigo to the middleclass, [and] champion o a rules-basedmarket democracy.” The move causedgrumbling within the , but Lulaheld firm. On taking office, he pledgedto preserve Cardoso’s tight fiscal andmonetary policies. Shortly after hisinauguration in January 2003, he pickedHenrique Meirelles—a well-regarded

financial executive and Cardoso ally—to run Brazil’s central bank and AntonioPalocci, another sober centrist, as financeminister. And then he started hackingaway at Brazil’s bloated national budget,cutting spending by about $4 billion inhis first year and imposing an even stricterbudget-surplus target than the Interna-tional Monetary Fund recommended.

The payoff was immediate. Many othe same antagonists who had attackedhim during the campaign now swooned.In March 2003, Mohamed El-Erian,then managing director o the bond giant, declared that the president’sinitial moves had been “very good,” andthe markets agreed. Within six monthso Lula’s inauguration, the value o Brazil’s

bonds rose by 20 percent, and even Gold-man Sachs sheepishly admitted that itswarnings had been wrong.


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ered best practice. Yet three insightshad convinced Lula and his advisers othe benefits o their new approach.

First, Brazil’s own experience had

shown that large-scale attempts to allevi-ate poverty by distributing goods, suchas a massive food program Cardosolaunched in the late 1990s, generallyflopped in an embarrassing and expen-sive fashion. Providing the poor withphysical stuff is complicated, costly,and inefficient. It also requires a largebureaucracy, which creates endless

opportunities for corruption—aperennial problem in Brazil.Second, a few academic studies

(which would later be confirmed by aslew o follow-on research) had startedto confirm what Lula, who disdainedexperts, already knew: that the peoplewho best understood what the poorreally needed were the poor themselves.When given the chance, destitute families

generally didn’t squander their windfalls.Most spent the money quite rationally—especially when the cash went to mothers,not fathers, as it would under BolsaFamília. “It sometimes bothers myeducated friends when I say this,” Lulatold me in late 2014,

but the number one teacher in mylife was a woman who was born anddied illiterate: my mother. With alldue respect to experts and academics,they know very little about the poor.They know a lot about statistics, butthat’s different, sabe? To an intellec-tual, putting $50 in the hands o apoor person is charity; an academichas no idea what a poor person cando with it. But that’s because atuniversity, they don’t teach you howto care for the poor. And it’s becausemost experts have never experienced


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also be required to get prenatal careand to breastfeed their infants.)

Lula had two reasons for imposingsuch rules. He knew that while he himsel

might have managed to claw his way outo poverty by the tips o his nine fingers,he had been exceptionally lucky to do so.For most Brazilians, demographics weredestiny: i you were born poor, you woulddie that way, too. Lula was determinedto break the intergenerational trap byenabling—and requiring—parents to givetheir children greater advantages than

they themselves had enjoyed, in the formo education, health care, and nutrition.Lula also knew that attaching strict

conditions to his new aid program wouldmake it easier to sell to the rest o society,something that would otherwise havebeen difficult. Prior to Lula, most socialassistance programs in Brazil had takenthe form o insurance schemes thatdisproportionately benefited the middle

and upper classes. Bolsa Família was thefirst time a Brazilian president had reallyput combating poverty and inequality atthe center o his agenda (at least morethan rhetorically), and that all butguaranteed a fight.

THE BATTLE FOR BUYIN

The pushback started the moment the

program was introduced in October2003. Some economists argued thatthe government should be investing ininfrastructure, such as schools, ratherthan paying people to have their chil-dren attend them. Others said thatparents shouldn’t be told what to dofor their kids. And conservative punditswarned that the cash transfers would

create welfare dependency. “The oppo-sition said we were going to create anarmy o lazy people,” Lula told me.

what the poor go through every day.They’ve never had to go to workwithout breakfast. They’ve neverlived in a flooded house, or hadto wait three hours at a bus stop.To experts, a social problem likeinequality is only numbers.

Finally, Lula had also realized thatthe wave o privatizations that hadswept Latin America in the 1980s and1990s—as governments sold off every-thing from airlines and energy producersto utility providers—had left hundreds

o millions o citizens stranded, too poorto participate in the expanding marketeconomies. Lula and his advisers reck-oned that, rather than go through thenightmare o renationalizing big busi-nesses, the best and simplest way toreverse the poor’s exclusion was to puta little cash in their pockets. So Luladecided to do just that.

As the president and his aides

devised the program, qualifying forassistance under Bolsa Família wouldbe simple. Any family that could provethat it lived in extreme poverty—thendefined as earning less than 50 reais(about $42) per person per month—would be eligible for payments, aswould moderately poor families thatearned less than 100 reais per person.

But i getting into the programwould be easy, staying in it would takework. Participants would have to meetseveral conditions, or contrapartidas (counterpart responsibilities): ensurethat all their children between six and15 years old attended school at least85 percent o the time, make sure thatany o their children under seven got

immunized, and guarantee that bothmothers and children got regular medi-cal checkups. (Pregnant women would


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commitment” to the “positive behaviors”required by the program made thosebeneficiaries seem more deserving,

explained Fiszbein and Schady, givingthe public the sense that they hadearned the cash.

O course, simply announcing formalconditions wasn’t enough; there also hadto be consequences for noncompliance.To that end, Bolsa Família’s architectsdesigned a system o graduated penaltiesfor those who failed to do their duty.

Rule breakers would get a warning; ithey still didn’t comply, their benefitswould be suspended; and i the troublecontinued, they’d eventually get bouncedout o the program altogether.

While such sanctions looked good onpaper, Lula soon learned the hard waythat getting the public to take themseriously would require proo that the

rules were actually being enforced. In2004, the program’s rapid expansiondiverted effort and attention away from

Under Brazil’s constitution, thepresident was able to launch a programsuch as Bolsa Família on his own executive

authority. But the law also stipulatedthat he needed congressional approvalwithin a year in order to get it renewed.This meant that Lula would have tosecure broad-based support i his signa-ture program was going to survive—and the contrapartidas were his key togetting it. “The idea was to show thatwe are not giving out money for free,”

Lula explained to me. “We had to buildtrust, even among those who wereskeptical about this kind o a program.”As Ariel Fiszbein and Norbert Schady,two World Bank economists, have docu-mented, the conditions helped Lula dothat by creating the popular impressionthat Bolsa Família was not some sop tothe poor but rather a new sort o social

contract with them, under which recipi-ents had to do their part as well. Makingbeneficiaries show “clear evidence o

M A R I O T A M A

/ G E T T Y

I M A G E S

Moving on up: participants in the Bolsa Família program, Rio de Janeiro, October 2013


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implementation, including establishing aunified national registry to keep track oeveryone who got assistance, centraliz-ing Bolsa Família’s eligibility criteria,

implementing audits and spot checks,setting up citizen oversight committeesand complaint hot lines, and requiringthat Bolsa Família participants getrecertified every two years.

By mid-2006, monitoring and en-forcement had improved dramatically:in June o that year, the cut somehal a million ineligible recipients from

its rolls. Brazilians noticed, and wereimpressed. The criticism ebbed, andpublic support for the program beganto climb. Indeed, a 2010 analysis opolling data and media coverage byKathy Lindert and Vanina Vincensini,two World Bank experts, found that byimposing rigorous conditions for assis-tance, Lula’s government legitimizedBolsa Família with Brazilian voters,

generating widespread enthusiasm for iton both ends o the political spectrum.

MONEY FOR NEXT TO NOTHING

As useful as Lula’s contrapartidas were inboosting Bolsa Família’s popularity, twoother innovations would prove almostas important. First, for all its ambitions,Bolsa Família was, and remains, cheap—

radically so, compared with most othersocial welfare programs in Brazil andelsewhere. Today, more than a decadeafter its launch, Bolsa Família reachesabout 14 million families, which trans-lates to about 55 million Brazilians—an enormous number. Yet because Lulaand his advisers recognized that it takesonly a small sum o money to make a

big difference in a poor family’s life, theindividual payments (which vary accord-ing to income and family size) are tiny:

overseeing compliance with its require-ments. Learning that only 55 percento Brazil’s public schools were evenbothering to report on whether Bolsa

Família recipients were meeting theirattendance quotas, the administrationdecided to suspend all monitoringtemporarily. This decision might havemade sense bureaucratically, since itbought the government time to get itshouse in order. But it proved to be apublic relations disaster.

Globo, an anti-Lula media conglom-

erate, saw the opportunity and pounced. Just a few days before nationwide munici-pal elections in October, Fantástico, apopular Sunday-evening news programon a Globo network, broadcast an investi-gative report alleging widespread abuseo Lula’s flagship program by undeserv-ing recipients. The rest o Brazil’s mediaquickly jumped on the story, the publicwas incensed, and within a week o the

broadcast, the government had receivedseveral thousand angry complaints.

Sensing the danger, Lula decided toface his critics head-on. “What is thelesson we learned from this moment?Humility,” he told me. “You have torecognize that a very big program willhave mistakes. You have to admit them.And then you have to fix them.” To that

end, Lula set up the new Ministry oSocial Development and Fight AgainstHunger (known by its Portugueseabbreviation, ) to centralize over-sight o Bolsa Família. Departing fromBrazil’s long tradition o patronagepolitics, he staffed the new body withhighly trained technocrats rather thanpartisan hacks. Then, in January 2005,

he personally presided over the publiclaunch o a sweeping new multiagencystrategy for improving Bolsa Família’s


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Although the price tag for BolsaFamília may be small, its impact hasproved enormous. Not only has it reachedmore than a quarter o the overall popula-

tion (and 85 percent o the poor), butthe payments, tiny though they are, havedoubled the incomes o Brazil’s mostdestitute families. In its first three years,Bolsa Família cut extreme poverty by15 percent, and by 2014, the percentageo Brazilians living in indigence had beenslashed to less than three percent—a levelthe World Bank considers equivalent

to eradication. At the same time, BolsaFamília has helped lift a total o 36 millionpeople out o general poverty, producingwhat Matias Spektor, a political scien-tist and columnist for Brazil’s biggestnewspaper, Folha de S.Paulo, describedto me as “the single largest ten-yearchange to a country’s class structuresince Japan after World War II.”

As for inequality, recent studies

credit Bolsa Família with having helpedreduce the country’s overall income gapby a third and rank the program as thesecond most important contributor tothis change after general economicgrowth. According to Tereza Campello,the country’s minister o social devel-opment, the income o the poorest20 percent o Brazilians rose by 6.2

percent between 2002 and 2013, whilethat o the country’s richest 20 percentgrew by only 2.6 percent. (That standsin sharp contrast to the United States,where during the same period, theincome o the richest ten percent roseby 2.6 percent, while that o the poorestten percent shrank by 8.6 percent.)Although the Brazilian government

has implemented a number o otherimportant social support programs,including big hikes to the minimum

the average family gets just $65 a month,and benefits top out at $200.

As a result, “the amount spent onBolsa Família is nothing,” says Yoshiaki

Nakano, the director o the São PauloSchool o Economics. That’s an exag-geration, but not a big one. The fact isthat one o the world’s most ambitiousantipoverty programs currently costsBrazilian taxpayers less than hal a percento the country’s $2.3 trillion , farless than the government spends on,say, pensions (a much more regressive

support mechanism). Although preciseinternational comparisons are hard tomake, the evidence suggests that BolsaFamília is one o the cheapest antipov-erty programs anywhere. Indeed, a 2011study by the British government foundthat thanks in part to their minimaladministrative expenses, cash-transferprograms such as Bolsa Família cost 30percent less per person than more

traditional aid programs.The program was also structured

in such a way that it would ultimatelybenefit all Brazilians, not just those atthe bottom. As Lula explained whenhe first introduced it, “When millionscan go to the supermarket to buy milk, tobuy bread, the economy will work better.The miserable will become consumers.”

By giving people money that they couldspend however they wanted, Lula createdwhat Lena Lavinas, a welfare economistat the Federal University o Rio de Janeiro,has called “a pro-market approach tocombating poverty.” Indeed, no less anauthority than Jorge Castañeda, a formerconservative foreign minister o Mexicoturned columnist and scourge o the

Latin American left, has called BolsaFamília an “innovative welfare program”that is as “neoliberal . . . as one can get.”

itizens

x

onsumers


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families’ bank accounts, Bolsa Famíliahas empowered Brazilian women; forexample, female Bolsa Família partici-pants are ten percent more likely to

say that they have exclusive authorityover contraception in their marriages.And the program seems to have had adramatic impact on poor Brazilians’sense o agency. A recent survey o1,400 Bolsa Família beneficiaries inthree different cities found that ratherthan feeling stigmatized by their depen-dence on the government program,

three-quarters o respondents said thatthey were proud to be enrolled and that,by allowing them to properly feed andclothe their children without having tobeg, Bolsa Família has helped them “leadmore autonomous and dignified lives.”

Brazilians enrolled in the programeven express increased faith in theircountry’s democracy. That might seeman odd outcome for a welfare program,

but as Lula explains, “Part o the reasonBolsa Família has been so successful isbecause the money is paid directly, withno intermediary. It is the beneficiarywho goes to the bank with a plasticcard to withdraw the money. So thisperson doesn’t owe any favors to thepresident, to their governor, to theircongressman, or to their mayor.” And

the lack o middlemen also makes ithard, i not impossible, for officials toskim off the top.

Finally, just as Lula promised, BolsaFamília has provided a significant boostto the overall economy. By giving thepoor more money to spend, the programhas increased domestic consumption, anespecially important economic driver in

a country like Brazil, which shuns mostimports. Although most o the moneyis spent on food, Lula says that “o the

wage, and although a growing economyhelped matters, most experts agree thatBolsa Família deserves a huge amounto the credit for the overall improvement

in the lives o the country’s poor. BolsaFamília has also proved an importantcushion as Brazil’s growth has slowedin recent years. The country’s overalleconomy may be hurting today, butthanks to the buffer provided by BolsaFamília, the masses are not—or at leastnot compared to the way they sufferedduring the country’s many past crises.

Bolsa Família has also made greatstrides toward Lula’s goal o breaking thetransmission o poverty from one genera-tion to the next: by helping increasevaccination rates to 99 percent o thepopulation, by decreasing malnutritionamong children in Brazil’s poorest regionsby 16 percent, and by increasing theirchances o having a healthy weight-to-age ratio by 26 percent. Infant mortality

has dropped by 40 percent in the lastdecade, with deaths from malnutritionspecifically down by 58 percent—oneo the sharpest reductions ever seenanywhere. Meanwhile, the number ochildren forced to work instead o attend-ing school has fallen by 14 percent. BolsaFamília recipients now boast a gradua-tion rate double that o poor Brazilian

children outside the program, and theinitiative is credited with improvingschool attendance in the country’s poorestregions by 14 percent. One happy conse-quence: the national literacy rate hasalready risen.

The program has also producedsome less tangible and less predictable—although just as important—changes in

the lives and attitudes o Brazil’s poorestcitizens. One recent survey found thatby giving them authority over their


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Lula’s successor, has expanded theprogram’s reach and upped its benefitsseveral times. She even launched aninitiative called Busca Ativa (Active

Search) that sends intrepid social workersto the country’s most remote corners—sometimes by jungle boat—in search omore needy Brazilians to enroll in theprogram. Meanwhile, during the 2014election, both o her opponents promisedto extend Bolsa Família still further. Todo otherwise would have been “politicalsuicide,” says Thiago de Aragão, a politi-

cal consultant in Brasília.None o this enthusiasm means thatBolsa Família is perfect. Although theprogram has helped Brazil make historicprogress, the country still remains fartoo unequal. Under Rousseff, economicgrowth has ground to a halt and thecountry’s debt has soared. And despiteBolsa Família’s massive reach, about 28million Brazilians still live in poverty.

Some experts worry that by focusingso intensely on the needs o Brazilianchildren, the program neglects theirimpoverished parents (whose benefitsdrop precipitously when their childrenreach 17). Feminist scholars such asMaxine Molyneux o University CollegeLondon caution that “by making trans-fers conditional on ‘good motherhood,’”

initiatives such as Bolsa Família reinforcetraditional gender roles. And Lavinas,among others, points out that while theBrazilian government has done a good

job getting kids into school, it has donefar less to improve the education theyreceive there—one o many reasonsmassive numbers o Brazilians took tothe streets to protest poor government

services in 2013.Bolsa Família’s positive impact isalso undermined by Brazil’s regressive

people that received benefits underthe Bolsa, 80 percent o them bought atelevision set, 79 percent o them boughta refrigerator, and 50 percent o them

bought a washing machine. So what hadseemed like a program just for peoplewho were living in eighteenth-centuryconditions helped meet the needs omodern manufacturers, generatingmillions o jobs. Everyone won.” Thatmay sound like boasting, but the num-bers bear it out: economists calculatethat since its launch, Bolsa Família has

increased Brazil’s growth by 1.78reais for every one real disbursed.

SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE

These accomplishments have madeBolsa Família incredibly popular inBrazil; recent polls put its approvalrating at around 75 percent. “Todayeverybody’s happy,” Lavinas told me.“The poor because they are less poor,

and the rich because the program is socheap that they don’t care.” Even themiddle class, traditionally the mostconservative segment o Brazil’s elec-torate, has embraced Bolsa Família. AsSpektor explains, this group “grew upin a country that was always gettingworse. As Brazil democratized [in themid-1980s], violence went up, inequal-

ity went up, inflation went up. Wewere geared toward thinking thingswere awful. I you hoped for a future,you wanted to learn English and getthe hell out o here. Now, suddenly,I’d rather be here than anywhere else.And that’s thanks to Bolsa.”

Seeing how popular the program isand how much it did to help Lula’s

political fortunes over the years, virtu-ally all other Brazilian politicians haverushed to embrace it. Dilma Rousseff,


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to copy its model. Within just a fewyears o Bolsa Família’s inception, infact, the was so swamped by allthe foreign requests for advice that it

began holding twice-yearly seminarson how to launch similar programselsewhere. As o this writing, at least40 states have taken that step, includ-ing most o the countries o LatinAmerica, as well as Bangladesh,Indonesia, Morocco, South Africa,and Turkey (to name just a few).There have even been some copycat

programs deployed in U.S. cities,such as Memphis and New York—more proof, i it’s needed, o the globalappeal o Brazil’s great experiment.∂

tax system, which relies excessively onconsumption tariffs. These fees, whichcover virtually every imaginable goodand many services, eat up a big share—as

much as 55 percent, by some estimates—o Bolsa Família stipends. Finally,financial analysts attack Bolsa Famíliafor reducing inequality at the expenseo overall growth, and some Braziliansstill insist the cash transfers only makepeople more dependent on the dole.

Certainly, Bolsa Família can and shouldbe improved. Brazil also desperately

needs tax, health-care, and educationalreform, as well as greater investment ininfrastructure. But a wealth o evidencecontradicts at least some o the critics’charges. Government statistics show that75 percent o adult Bolsa Família recipi-ents do work, for example, and generallythose who don’t, can’t—because they livein areas with too few job opportunities.

It should come as no surprise,

then, that despite its imperfections, theprogram has attracted wide admirationabroad as well as at home. Nancy Bird-sall, the president o the Washington-based Center for Global Development,has called Bolsa Família “as close as youcan come to a magic bullet in develop-ment.” Other boosters range from The New York Times (which dubbed Bolsa

Família “likely the most importantgovernment anti-poverty program theworld has ever seen”) to The Economist(which declared it “a stunning success”).

Perhaps the best testament to thebrilliance o Bolsa Família’s design,however—as well to the defiantlyunorthodox, something-for-everyoneapproach Lula used to formulate and

then sell it—is the fact that since theprogram’s creation, more than 63countries have sent experts to Brazil

Documents

FA - Brazils Antipoverty Breakthrough