# **6. Access to Services and Assets**

The problem of social exclusion, poverty, and inequality in Pará largely reflects disparities in opportunity. The distribution of key productive assets – labor, human capital, physical assets, financial assets, and social capital – is highly unequal. These disparities are most prevalent between the poor and non-poor, but also manifest themselves differently by geographic area. Also access to services is unequal. This section addresses social exclusion in a few of these areas, namely labor, education, and social protection.

## **LABOR**

Labor is the rural and urban poor’s most abundant asset and it accounts for nearly all of their total income. Nonetheless, the poor are constrained in their use of this asset in a number of ways: (1) high level of unemployment; (2) a strong correlation between informal sector employment and poverty; and (3) black, pardo and female workers face probable wage discrimination. Data shows that formal sector employment has not been able to keep up with population growth in Pará.

The poverty analysis reveals that many workers in Pará, particularly those in the informal sector, are poor. The challenge of creating employment is therefore to increase the number of jobs that are able to provide sufficient income to lift the employee’s household out of poverty or cushion against it. Creating jobs regardless of quality is not enough—people need good jobs. As the labor market, particularly the informal one, is relatively flexible, the worry is about generating sufficient income via employment rather than simply having a job. The trend in this regard, as reflected by decreasing real wages of informal workers in Brazil, is discouraging.

According to the Census 2000 data, the labor force in Pará counts 4.7 million people over 10 years of age, that is, 75.8 percent of the total population. In Pará, less than the majority of the participants in the labor force are active (49 percent), a smaller share than in Brazil as a whole (55.9 percent). Moreover, 51.1 percent of the labor force received no income and 19.1 percent earned less than one minimum salary of R$151 in 2000. Of the Paráenses that worked in the reference week of the Census 2000, 13.7 percent was engaged in activities contributing to own consumption, i.e. around the double of that in Brazil as a whole (6.9 percent). These figures are in line with the information obtained during field visits in Pará, which clearly indicate that in the rural dwellers, including the _Quilombos_ , _Riberinhos,_ and other populations, do not earn any income from their activities. In many rural areas in the North and Northeast of Brazil, the majority of the money circulating originates from pensions and conditional-cash transfers, such as _Bolsa Escola_ (see below).

The demographic change that demands the most urgent policy response is the sizeable growth in the economically active population. Some of the growth in the economically active population is from in-migration, but most of it is natural growth. The high rate of growth of this age cohort—along with increasing female participation in the labor force—means that a high number of good new jobs are needed each year to keep pace, and better jobs are needed by those already in poor jobs. This is a major challenge.

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