Income and earnings inequality have fallen consistently in Brazil in the last 20 years. In this article, we intend to understand how these trends are associated with the country's occupational structure, an overlooked dimension in the Brazilian debate concerning the theme. Our discussion starts with a detailed analysis of the pattern and quality of the jobs created between 2002 and 2012 in the country. This discussion draws the background to the following theme we address, which is the earnings inequality trend in the same period. We scrutinize the trends in two different ways. The first is a decomposition our chosen inequality index year by year. Second, we put into focus only the inequality decrease and how it is associated with the occupational component and other characteristics such as race, gender, region and education. Our results highlight the importance of the occupational structure, with its between and within occupations components accounting for more than half of the inequality observed in each year. Despite this importance, the occupational structure has a minor influence in relation to the fall of inequality, which is more associated with changes related to education. These results show that the significant changes that occurred in the Brazilian labor market in the last ten years were not associated with changes in the occupational structure. We demonstrate that differences between and within occupations have remained stable. Our results and analyses contribute in a non trivial way to highlight the structural quality income inequality in Brazil, pointing to the institutional factors associated with it through a sociological interpretation.
Income inequality; Earnings inequality; Job expansion; Occupations; Occupational structure
