CORRECTED - Brazil's racial income gap narrows-ILO

(Corrects name of ILO director for Brazil)

BRASILIA, May 10 (Reuters) - Income inequality between races in Brazil has narrowed over the past decade but a black woman still earns only half what a white man makes, a United Nations report showed on Thursday.

The difference in income between blacks and whites in Brazil narrowed by 31 percent between 1995 and 2005, according to an International Labor Organization study of global workplace discrimination.

The income gap narrowed because of successive minimum wage hikes, lower inflation and declining real wages for white men, the report said.

Brazil also made progress in advancing policies to reduce race inequality, said Lais Abramo, ILO director for Brazil.

"There are many countries that don't even want to recognize race discrimination," she said.

Still, the median income for black women was 316 reais ($156) a month in 2005 versus 632 reais for white men. Black men earned less than white women and almost two-thirds the pay of white men in 2005, the latest year for which data was available.

Black men and women earned significantly less than their white counterparts no matter what level of education they achieved, Abramo said.

Racism in Brazil has tended to be less violent than in South Africa and less overt than in the United States, analysts say. Ethnic mixing between Africans, tribal Indians and mostly European immigrants has been common, earning Brazil a reputation as a harmonious melting pot.

But the racial divide reinforces Brazil's huge gap between rich and poor, one of the world's widest, experts say.

"These are significant inequalities," said the ILO's Abramo. "Gender and race are not minority issues in Brazil. We're talking about a broad majority of society," she added.

Brazil claims to have the world's second-largest black population after Nigeria, with 45 percent of some 185 million people declaring themselves black.

A former Portuguese colony that abolished slavery in 1888, Brazil imported roughly ten times more Africans for slave labor than the United States.