Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics in the context of "State of Rio de Janeiro"

Brazil is geopolitically divided into five regions (also called macroregions), by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, which are formed by the federative units of Brazil. Although officially recognized, the division is merely academic, considering geographic, social and economic factors, among others, and has no political effects other than orientating Federal-level government programs. Under the state level, they are further divided into intermediate regions and even further into immediate regions.

Brazil has a high level of urbanization with 87.8% of the population residing in urban and metropolitan areas. The criteria used by the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) in determining whether households are urban or rural, however, are based on political divisions, not on the developed environment. Its most populous city is São Paulo.

Nowadays, the country has 5,571 cities, with 5,569 municipalities plus the capital (Brasília) and the Island of Fernando de Noronha.

Arab Brazilians are Brazilian citizens of Arab ethnic, cultural, linguistic heritage and identity. The majority of Arab Brazilians trace their origin to the Levantine region of the Arab World, known in Arabic as Bilad al-Sham, primarily from Lebanon and Syria, as well as Palestine. Christians are the majority of the Arab Brazilians. The first Syrians and Lebanese arrived in São Paulo around 1880. It is not known exactly when, although the Syrians and Lebanese say that in 1885 there was a small core of peddlers working in the market square. By 1920, the census listed 50,246 Syrians and Lebanese in Brazil, 38.4% (2/5) of these in the state of São Paulo. The 1940 census enumerated 48,614 Syrians, Lebanese and other related groups with a decrease of approximately 1647 people. As immigration almost ceased after 1929 and the colony aged, it is surprising that the decline was not even greater. The trend of the period between 1920 and 1940 was the continuous concentration of Syrians and Lebanese in São Paulo. Almost half (49.3%) of Syrians and Lebanese residents in Brazil lived in São Paulo.

Contemporary data on the number of Arab descendants in Brazil is highly inconsistent. The national IBGE census has not questioned the ancestry of the Brazilian people for several decades, considering that immigration to Brazil declined almost to 0 in the second half of the 20th century. In the last census questioning ancestry, in 1940, 107,074 Brazilians said they were the children of a Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Iraqi or Arab father. The native Arabs were 46,105 and the naturalized Brazilians, 5,447. Brazil had 41,169,321 inhabitants at the time of the census, so Arabs and children were 0.38% of Brazil's population in 1940. Currently, many sources cite that millions of Brazilians are of Arab descent. Itamaraty claims that there are between 7 and 10 million Lebanese descendants in Brazil. However, independent research, based on the interviewee's self-declaration, found much smaller numbers. According to a 2008 IBGE survey, 0.9% of the white Brazilians interviewed said they had a family background in Western Asia, which would give about one million people. According to another 1999 survey by the sociologist and former president of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) Simon Schwartzman, only 0.48% of the interviewed Brazilians claimed to have Arab ancestry, a percentage that, in a population of about 200 million of Brazilians, would represent around 960 thousand people.

This is a list of the metropolitan areas in Brazil, containing the legally defined metropolitan areas with more than one million inhabitants in Brazil, according to estimates published by IBGE.

Rio de Janeiro (Brazilian Portuguese pronunciation: [ˈʁi.u d(ʒi) ʒɐˈne(j)ɾu] ) is one of the 27 federative units of Brazil. It has the second largest economy of Brazil, with the largest being that of the state of São Paulo. The state, which has 8.2% of the Brazilian population, is responsible for 9.2% of the Brazilian GDP.

The state of Rio de Janeiro is located within the Brazilian geopolitical region classified as the Southeast (assigned by IBGE). Rio de Janeiro shares borders with all the other states in the same Southeast macroregion: Minas Gerais (N and NW), Espírito Santo (NE) and São Paulo (SW). It is bounded on the east and south by the South Atlantic Ocean. Rio de Janeiro has an area of 43,653 km (16,855 sq mi). Its capital is the city of Rio de Janeiro, which was the capital of the Portuguese Colony of Brazil from 1763 to 1815, of the following United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves from 1815 to 1822, and of later independent Brazil as a kingdom and republic from 1822 to 1960.

Afro-Brazilians (Portuguese: Afro-brasileiros; pronounced [ˈafɾo bɾaziˈle(j)ɾus]), also known as Black Brazilians (Portuguese: Brasileiros negros), are Brazilians of total or predominantly Sub-Saharan African ancestry. Most multiracial Brazilians also have a range of degree of African ancestry. Brazilians whose African features are more evident are generally seen by others as Black and may identify themselves as such using the term preto, for instance. Those with less noticeable African features may not be seen as such, but nevertheless choose to identify themselves using the term pardo, negro, or afrodescendente. However, Brazilians rarely use the term "Afro-Brazilian" as a term of ethnic identity and never in informal discourse.

Preto ("black") and pardo ("brown/mixed") are among five ethnic categories used by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), along with branco ("white"), amarelo ("yellow", ethnic East Asian), and indígena (indigenous). In the 2022 census, 20.7 million Brazilians (10,2% of the population) identified as preto, while 92.1 million (45,3% of the population) identified as pardo, together making up 55.5% of Brazil's population. The term preto is usually used to refer to those with the darkest skin colour, so as a result of this many Brazilians of African descent identify themselves as pardos. The Brazilian Black Movement considers pretos and pardos together as part of a single category: negros (Blacks). In 2010, this perspective gained official recognition when Brazilian Congress passed a law creating the Statute of Racial Equality. However, this definition is contested since a portion of pardos are acculturated indigenous people or people with indigenous and European rather than African ancestry, especially in Northern Brazil. A survey from 2002 revealed that if the pardo category were removed from the census, at least half of those identifying as pardo would instead choose to identify as black. Another survey from 2024 showed that only 40% of pardos consider themselves Black.

The Lebanese people (Arabic: الشعب اللبناني / ALA-LC: ash-shaʻb al-Lubnānī, Lebanese Arabic pronunciation: [eʃˈʃæʕeb ellɪbˈneːne]) are the people inhabiting or originating from Lebanon. The term may also include those who had inhabited Mount Lebanon and the Anti-Lebanon Mountains prior to the creation of the modern Lebanese state. The major religious groups among the Lebanese people within Lebanon are Shia Muslims (27%), Sunni Muslims (27%), Maronite Christians (21%), Greek Orthodox Christians (8%), Melkite Christians (5%), Druze (5%), Protestant Christians (1%). The largest contingent of Lebanese, however, comprise a diaspora in North America, South America, Europe, Australia and Africa, which is predominantly Maronite Christian.

As the relative proportion of the various sects is politically sensitive, Lebanon has not collected official census data on ethnic background since 1932 under the French Mandate. It is therefore difficult to have an exact demographic analysis of Lebanese society.The largest concentration of people with Lebanese ancestry may be in Brazil, having an estimated population of 5.8 to 7 million. However, it may be an exaggeration given that an official survey conducted by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) showed that less than 1 million Brazilians claimed any Middle-Eastern origin. The Lebanese have always traveled the world, many of them settling permanently within the last two centuries.

The Intermediate and Immediate geographic regions (Portuguese: Regiões geográficas Intermediárias e Imediatas) in Brazil constitute the country's regional geographic division, according to the composition prepared by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).

The immediate geographic regions are groupings of municipalities whose main reference is the urban network and have a local urban center as a base, through the IBGE analysis. For its elaboration, the connection of nearby cities through dependency relationships and displacement of the population in search of goods, provision of services and work were taken into consideration. Intermediate regions for their part, are groupings of immediate regions that are articulated through the influence of a metropolis, regional capital or representative urban center.

A microregion (Portuguese: Microrregião) was a legally defined area in Brazil consisting of a group of municipalities. They were abolished in 2017 and replaced by Intermediate and Immediate Geographic Regions. Microregions were grouped together into mesoregions. In theory, Brazilian law provided for member municipalities to cooperate on matters of common interest, but in practice, the divisions were used primarily for statistical purposes by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics.