Who Benefits from Economic Development?: Comment.

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      The article focuses on beneficiaries of economic development. Economist Gary Fields' recent examination of the distributive effects of Brazilian growth in the 1960's is a novel attempt to answer the controversial questions of who benefits from economic growth and by how much. It has attracted wide notice in academic and official circles. Fields' analysis starts from the uncorrected distributions of monetary income for the economically active populations in 1960 and 1970 that the author initially derived in 1972, He then applies to that 1960 distribution a poverty line defined as a monthly income of NCr$2.1. That standard is defended by appeal to the author's finding that 31 percent of Brazilian families in 1960 had inadequate incomes. The author holds that such a procedure is both critical to the findings and quite illegitimate. It ignores the difference between the distributions among individuals and families. It obscures the fact that the original analysis corrected for income in kind and regional price differences and it takes too lightly the problems posed by inclusion of a large group of individual zero-income recipients.