IJPDS International Journal of Population Data Science

A team of researchers from Brazil and the UK has developed the Brazilian Deprivation Index (Índice Brasileiro de Privação - IBP). It is a new small-area measure designed to assess socioeconomic deprivation across the entirety of Brazil. The index fills a critical gap in health data, where socioeconomic variables are often missing, making it difficult to monitor and address health inequalities.

The IBP reveals stark geographical disparities, with rural areas showing significantly higher levels of deprivation than urban centres. Importantly, the IBP also highlights the impact of deprivation on health outcomes. For example, in the state of Minas Gerais, age-standardised mortality rates from ill-defined causes were 2.6 times as high in the most deprived areas compared to the least deprived.

Using data from the 2010 Brazilian Demographic Census, the IBP was constructed from indicators of literacy, household income, and housing conditions. These variables were standardised and combined into a single score for over 303,000 census sectors, covering 99.7% of the population.

“The IBP is a powerful new tool to monitor health inequalities in one of the world’s most diverse middle-income countries. However, the IBP not only provides a clearer picture of inequality in Brazil but also offers a model for other low- and middle-income countries seeking to improve health equity through better use of data,” said Dandara Ramos, one of the study authors.

“This index is a major step forward in understanding and addressing the social determinants of health in Brazil,” said Ruth Dundas, one of the senior authors of the paper. “It demonstrates how existing data can be harnessed to create meaningful tools for population health planning and policy.”

 

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Índice Brasileiro de Privação (IBP)

Allik, M., Pereira Pinto-Júnior, E., Ramos, D., Ferreira, A., Alves, F. J., Teixeira, C., Agranonik, M., Flores-Ortiz, R., Rebouças, P., de Cássia Ribeiro-Silva, R., Sanchez, M., Katikireddi, S. V., Barreto, M., Leyland, A., Ichihara, M. Y. and Dundas, R. (2025) “A small area deprivation index for monitoring and evaluating health inequalities in a diverse, low and middle income country: the Índice Brasileiro de Privação (IBP)”, International Journal of Population Data Science, 10(3). doi: 10.23889/ijpds.v10i3.2974.