This paper discusses the redefinition of the origin of poverty and the form of managing it starting from the turning of the eighties to the nineties of the XX century, taking as an example the Brazilian case. It rescues the dominant approaches that emphasized the structural causes of the poverty starting from the dynamics of the labor market until the fordism crisis and it is centered at the new discursive matrix on poverty of the nineties, that finds in the World Bank its most paradigmatic formulation. In this vision, the center of the debate on the origin of poverty and on the policies against it is moved to the individuals and their deficit, not reckoning on relative structural issues regarding the relation capital x work and, especially, to the labor market and emphasizing the description of the situation of the poor and the measuring of poverty, essential for the formulation of policies focused in the administration of poverty. It sustains its critic starting from the analysis of comparative information regarding the operation of the labor market in the desenvolvimentism years and in the most recent period.
work; labor market; poverty; World Bank; Brazil
