Brazil+Economic

Population below poverty line: ** 26% (2005) Interesting Facts:  A economic distinction is made between the poor, underdeveloped North and the wealthier, more industrialized South. This distinction is sometimes referred to as the "two Brazils" or "Belindia," with the wealthy South being compared to Belgium and the poor North to India. At times these contrasts are translated into negative stereotypes as when inhabitants of São Paulo, the huge metropolis in southeastern Brazil, blame their city's poverty and high crime rate on migrants from the North.
 * Brazil's Economy
 * National product:** GDP - purchasing power equivalent - $1.04 trillion
 * Average Income:** $570 per month
 * Agriculture Products:** coffee, soy beans, wheat, rice, corn, sugarcane, cocoa, citrus, beef
 * Electricity consumption:** 404.3 billion kWh
 * Labor force: agriculture**: 20% Industry: 14% services: 66%



 The people of Brazil:
 * Fertility rates have dropped dramatically in Brazil in the last three or four decades of the twentieth century, with the completed fertility rate at the turn of the twenty-first century down to an average of 2.1 children per woman.
 * The population will continue to grow in the first twenty or thirty years of the twenty-first century because of the nation's current youthful age structure.
 * Somewhere between 2.5 and 5 million Brazilian Indians inhabited Brazil when the Portuguese first arrived in the early sixteenth century.
 * Today they comprise only about .02 percent of the country's population (that's a very little amount!)
 * Their numbers fell rapidly as a result of displacement, warfare and, most importantly, the introduction of European diseases against which they had no immunity (they could not fight the illnesses off).
 * Their numbers are now increasing owing to improved health care, lower incidence of disease, declining infant mortality, and a higher fertility rate.
 * Contemporary estimates of the indigenous population range from 280,000 to 300,000; the population may reach 400,000 early in the new millennium!


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