# Economic conditions of people of African descent in the Americas  
In spite of the immense contribution they have made to socioeconomic development in the Americas, people of African descent have languished at the bottom of the economic ladder in all countries of the Americas since their years of enslavement to their freedom. Given space constraint, Brazil and the United States, countries with the largest African descent populations, are the focus of the discussion in this section.  
With 97.2 million people of African descent in 2010 (Bucciferro, 2015, Table 1, p. 4), Brazil has the second largest black population in the world, after Nigeria. Afro-Brazilians constituted 51 per cent of the 2010 national total; the white population was 48 per cent. In 1800, the black population was 67 per cent of the national total (Andrews 2004, Table 1.1, p. 41), and 58 per cent in 1872 (Bucciferro, op. cit., Table 1, p. 4). In 1976, the average income of white Brazilians was 2.8 times that of Afro-Brazilians, 26.3 per cent of the difference arising from discrimination (Bucciferro, op. cit., p. 23) and the rest from the cumulative effects of limited access to education, health care, capital accumulation and geographical location; in 2010, when the average income of Afro-Brazilians was slightly less than half that of whites, they 'were disadvantaged in their level of education and in their access to health and other services'. In Rio de Janeiro (like several other cities), the 2010 census shows Afro-Brazilians constituted more than half of the people in the shanty towns (favelas/slumps) and only 7 per cent of the people in the city's richer districts (Reid, 2014, p. 181).  
Unlike Brazil, African-Americans in the United States make up only 12 per cent of the national population in recent times. However, like Brazil, as we have seen, their coerced labour on the plantations (especially the nineteenth-century