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English summary

Brazil in numbers, portraits from official data

This project brings together 778 public tables from Brazilian government institutions — most mirrored from Base dos Dados, the rest scraped independently to cover what it doesn't — and reads them through an investigative lens rather than a technical one.

The site was written in Portuguese first: it's a project about Brazil, sourced from Brazilian public institutions (RAIS, SIM, TSE, CGU, IBGE, INEP, CNES, and others via the Base dos Dados mirror), extended with independently-scraped sources that fill gaps Base dos Dados doesn't cover (sanctions lists, SICAF, SINAN Violência, consumer complaints), aimed first at Brazilian readers, researchers, and journalists. This page is a short English summary with direct links into full English translations of all 43 thematic essays — each one pairs a data-driven narrative with the tables behind it; the original pt-br essays remain available from each page's language switcher. Data coverage, institutional provenance, and the technical architecture behind the site (DuckDB, Parquet on object storage, an LLM natural-language-to-SQL layer) are documented in more depth in the project repository.

Each essay covers one domain — racial inequality, education, health, labor, politics, crime, the economy, the environment, public budgets, and more — built from linked microdata across ministries and public agencies. Findings are stated directly, with the supporting numbers shown alongside, in the tradition of data journalism rather than hedged academic writing.

The 43 themes

01
Racial Inequality & Social Stratification

Even within the same occupation, Black workers earn on average 23% less than white workers.

02
Education, Social Mobility & Inequality

A Black student at a public school scores 160 points lower on SAEB than a white student at a private school.

03
Health, Service Access & Social Determinants

Mixed-race mothers are operated on in 66% of births, nearly three times the WHO-recommended rate.

04
Labor Market, Informality & Stratification

Bankers earn ten times more than teachers, and more than 5 million formal employment records sit locked at the 99-minimum-wage pay cap.

05
Politics, Representation & Electoral Behavior

Only 4.4% of federal representatives are women, and a third of congressional candidates are lawyers or business owners.

06
Crime, Violence & Public Security

A Black man between 15 and 29 has eight times the chance of dying from police intervention than a white man the same age.

07
Economy, Credit & Regional Development

Five percent of rural producers capture 70% of all agricultural credit in the country, and three states concentrate more than half of national GDP.

08
Public Policy, Transfers & Social Protection

Bolsa Família reaches all 5,570 municipalities in the country, but pays an average of R$ 190 per benefit.

09
Gender, Family & Demographic Dynamics

143,583 children had children in Brazil in a single year.

10
Environment, Development & Sustainability

Over 70% of Brazilian emissions come from farmland.

11
Infrastructure, Services & Quality of Life

In Brazil's North, only 10% of sewage is collected.

12
Intersectionality & Compound Inequalities

Black women hold just 3% of the formal labor market's top positions.

13
Migration, Urbanization & Spatial Transformation

São Paulo alone absorbs more net migration than all other Brazilian states combined.

14
Consumption, Prices & Class Stratification

Poor families spend 45% of their income on food versus 20% for the rich.

15
Power, Elites & Social Reproduction

The average federal congressman has one hundred times the wealth of the voter who elected him.

16
Political Economy & Development

Companies pay five times more Income Tax than individuals.

17
Agriculture, Land Structure & Agribusiness

One percent of rural properties concentrate half of all Brazil's agricultural land.

18
Foreign Trade, Global Integration & Value Chains

Half of what Brazil exports leaves with no processing at all, 30% of the total depends on a single buyer, and 60% of the flow moves through prices fixed inside multinationals.

19
Financial Markets, Investment Funds & Capital Structure

Brazilians pay up to ten times more interest than Mexicans, and five companies alone account for nearly half of the Ibovespa.

20
Science, Technology, Scholarships & Academic Output

Brazil invests less than a third of what South Korea invests in research, concentrates 70% of scholarships in the Southeast, and leaves 85% of patents in foreign hands.

21
Corruption, Administrative Misconduct & Public Oversight

More than half of the budget authorized by Congress never becomes real spending, and three parliamentary committees alone concentrate R$ 30 billion in earmarks.

22
Climate, Wildfires & Temperature Variation

The Amazon has already warmed 1.2°C, but it was the Cerrado.

23
Epidemiology, Infectious Diseases & Health Surveillance

In 2021, COVID-19 alone killed more than all external causes combined, and Indigenous people still live 11 years less than White people.

24
Outpatient, Hospital & SUS Procedure Data

The North of the country has a third of the hospital beds and less than half the doctors per capita of the Southeast.

25
Federal Budget, Parliamentary Amendments & Budget Execution

The federal government spends twenty times more on debt interest than on Bolsa Família, and R$ 40 billion in earmarks went out with no identified recipient.

26
Public Servants, Personnel Management & State Elites

A diplomat earns five times more than a public-school teacher, and four names in Congress alone control R$ 30 billion in parliamentary earmarks.

27
Opinion Polls, Public Perception & Political Behavior

Polls show health as the population's top priority, and more than half of all earmarked spending goes there.

28
School Violence, Educational Security & Learning Environment

Students who feel unsafe at school score 15% lower in math.

29
Detailed Electoral Data, Litigation & Supreme Court

Candidates facing administrative-misconduct lawsuits get elected at a 40% rate.

30
Productive Structure, Companies, SMEs & Competitive Dynamics

0.1% of Brazilian companies concentrate 80% of all registered share capital in the country, and a large company bills twenty times more per worker than a microbusiness.

31
Human Development, Social Vulnerability & Composite Indices

Being born Black in Brazil raises the social-vulnerability index by 30%.

32
Connectivity, Digital Education & Telecom Infrastructure

Schools receive, in practice, only 30 to 40% of the internet speed they contracted for.

33
Comparative International Data & Global Rankings

Brazil is the world's second most unequal country, behind only South Africa.

34
Atlas, Georeferenced Maps & Territorial Bases

Brazil formally protects 25% of its own territory in conservation units and Indigenous lands.

35
Transportation and Urban Mobility

Dormitory towns on the metro periphery have the worst commute times in the country, and the share of Black victims in traffic accidents more than doubled in 20 years.

36
Religiosity, Faith Infrastructure and Income Inequality

One Catholic church per 1,005 faithful; one Evangelical temple per 138.

37
Sanctions, Offshore Structures & Corporate Impunity

Brazil has 957,885 suppliers cleared to sell to the state and just 93 companies formally barred by the federal audit court.

38
Basic Education, Literacy & International Comparison

Brazil's richest quartile of students scores 425 in PISA mathematics.

39
Justice, Audit Courts & the Cost of the Judiciary

92% of everything Brazil's state courts spend goes to personnel.

40
Fiscal Federalism & Municipal Financial Capacity

Santa Catarina's fiscal management scores 2.4 times better than Sergipe's.

41
Nutrition, Drug Prices & Access to Health

Prescription-only medicines cost three times more than over-the-counter ones.

42
Water, Climate & Threatened Biodiversity

Brazil has 7,676 species threatened with extinction.

43
Culture, Sport & International Performance

Brazil has won 150 Olympic medals in its entire history.