Study: More blacks than whites in Brazil

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil — Blacks will outnumber whites in Brazil this year for the first time since slavery was abolished, but the income gap between the two groups may take another 50 years to bridge, according to a government study released Tuesday.

The government's Applied Institute of Economic Research said Brazil, which has the world's second-largest black population after Nigeria, is decades away from racial equality despite public policies aimed at decreasing the gap.

Blacks generally earn 50 percent to 70 percent less than whites, and hold only 3.5 percent of management positions at Brazil's 500 largest companies, according to the labor-union statistics institute Diesse.

A 2004 study by the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro found the income gap between whites and blacks in Brazil was wider than in apartheid-era South Africa.

"Black people end up not having the access to an education that will allow them to climb to meet opportunities. And when there is an opening, they aren't always capable of competing for it," said Diesse director Clemente Ganz Lúcio.

In recent years, Brazil has created a system of quotas at public universities that has bridged the gap somewhat. But quotas are complicated in Brazil because of the high degree of mixing between races, and some critics say light-skinned people are taking spots reserved for blacks.

In 1976, when the Brazilian Statistics Institute began keeping reliable data on race, 57 percent of Brazil's 185 million people were white, and 40 percent were black or mixed-race.

The study was issued Tuesday to coincide with the 120th anniversary of abolition in Brazil. In 1888, it was the last country in the Western hemisphere to end slavery.