Paulínia, has attracted many petrochemical companies to the Campinas area, including DuPont, Rhone-Poulenc, and Royal Dutch Shell.
The Brazilian Pró-Álcool Program was developed in Campinas: a whole industry based on the use of ethanol as a combustible for motor vehicles, going from a new sucrose-rich sugarcane, to alcohol refineries, a huge distribution system, and, most recently, an internal combustion engine capable of using either gasoline or ethanol.
Other examples of Campinas-bred technologies are fiber optics, lasers for telecommunications and medical applications, integrated circuits design and fabrication, satellite environmental monitoring of natural resources, software for agriculture, digital telephone switches, deep-water oil exploration platforms and technologies, biomedical equipment, medical software, genetic engineering and recombinant DNA technologies for food production and pharmaceutics, and food engineering. Because of this, Campinas has been called the Brazilian Silicon Valley.
Socio-economic conditions
Low-cost apartments under construction.
Despite Campinas' position of wealth and social and economic opportunity vis-a-vis the rest of the country, the average per capita income of little more than US$ 17,700 per year clearly indicates that there are problems. If re-evaluated in terms of PPP (Purchasing Power Parity), Campinas' average income looks better (roughly 12,300 USD per year). In fact, Campinas is emblematic of the wealth distribution inequality that is so common in the country (Brazil is the 9th largest economy in the world, but ranks only 32nd in wealth generation per capita, and 117th in average Gini coefficient). Campinas has a Gini coefficient of 58%, which is almost the same as that of Brazil (59.3), a level similar to countries such as Zimbabwe and Paraguay. Such a level means that the top 10% richest make almost 70 times more than the 10% poorest.
This level of poverty
