Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/211341 
Year of Publication: 
2018
Series/Report no.: 
Texto para Discussão No. 2390
Publisher: 
Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada (IPEA), Brasília
Abstract (Translated): 
Despite being home to about 1 billion people (UN-Habitat, 2010) worldwide slums have received little attention in the economic literature. Data on slums is scarce and few studies have investigated the emergence of these pockets of poverty and inadequate housing scattered between otherwise regular urban areas. We bring some empirical grounding to this debate, by combining Census, terrain topography and water bodies data for Brazil. Thus, we provide the first consistent estimates on location, growth and the socio-economic characteristics of their inhabitants for every slum in Brazil. We show that while there is a strong association between income and distance to the city center for formal housing agents, the same association is less clear for informal housing agents. Moreover, the spatial dispersion of slums varies significantly between metropolitan areas. We propose one explanation for this: the role of geography. In fact, topographic and environmental conditions of informal housing areas are worse. In some extent, risky life conditions are the cost of having access to the opportunities only found with the proximity to the central formal city.
Subjects: 
slums
intra urban location
topography
hydrography
JEL: 
O15
O18
R31
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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