ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT is a field in search of itself. Within the last few years several surveys have appeared, ranging from article length to the definitive two volume Handbook of Economic Development with its 33 chapters and 1700 pages., 2 Even the World Bank's 1991 World Developmnent Report is devoted for the first time to a review of the fundamentals of the subject, rather than its customary analysis of specific problems like human resources, agriculture, industry, etc. This industry of self-reflection thrives from a conjunction of two circumstances. One is the disturbing reality of the lost decade of the 1980s which saw negative per capita economic growth for the countries of Africa and Latin America, even while positive results were being realized in most parts of Asia. for the first time in the postwar period, the presumption of continual

Brazil is now the eighth largest market economy in the world. Its 1979 per capita income of over $1,500 in current dollars, its sophisticated industrial structure, and its recent dynamism combine to give it a prominent place among the advanced developing countries. Not surprisingly, recent Brazilian experience has been an important subject for the analysis of economic development, not all of it uncritical. Such a focus on the Brazilian miracle and its aftermath is too limited. Brazilian growth and industrialization have a long history as do the regional and personal income inequalities that today increasingly command attention. Understanding the origins of Brazilian growth in the nineteenth-century export economy and the subsequent patterns of import substitution will not yield better rules for short-term debt management or monetary policy. But the longer perspective makes clear that sustained economic development requires more than following the dictates of the international market and getting prices right. Indeed it may on occasion involve rejecting such signals. I shall interpret four significant episodes

The two postwar decades have resolved definitively the capacity of developing nations to expand at rates in excess of 2 percent per capita. Yet it has become increasingly apparent that such a yardstick is an inadequate measure of performance. Here I examine another and more neglected dimension of development, the distribution of income. My objectives are fourfold: to describe briefly the procedures used to derive an estimated income distribution for Brazil for 1960;1 to discuss the profile of poverty as it presents itself in a developing country; to indicate the factors operating to produce skewness in the Brazilian distribution; and to assess, in light of these and governmental policy measures in the 1960's, the apparent changes between 1960 and 1970.