Normative and quantitative analysis of educational inequalities, with reference to Brazil

The existence of substantial socio-economic inequalities is one of the most fundamental features of the Brazilian society. Although educational inequality is not the only source of such socio-economic inequalities, it plays a major role, particularly regarding income inequality, both for current and for future generations. Acquiring a better understanding of the patterns of educational inequalities in Brazil is thus a relevant research topic, with implications for policy-making. The first part of the thesis contains a conceptual discussion in which we try to determine an appropriate definition of educational justice. We advocate the use of "essential educational achievements" as the relevant "currency of educational justice" and we defend a version of "equality of educational opportunity" in which the responsibility that is assigned to individuals increases as they grow up. While a remarkable quantitative improvement has taken place recently in Brazil, the situation concerning the quality of education is less clear. To explore qualitative aspects, in the second part, we turn to pupils' performance in standardized tests. Applying usual distributional assessment tools to such data, we map the intensity of educational inequalities in the country. Using recently-developed indices of inequality of opportunity, we assess the fairness of the Brazilian schooling system. Thus we identify both the areas where educational inequality is more intense, and those where educational unfairness is more severe. In the third part, we use econometric methods to investigate how the reallocation of educational resources could contribute to moving Brazilian educational system towards educational fairness. First, we evaluate the effect of teachers' wages on pupils' achievement, and our analysis suggests there is scope for Brazilian public schools to improve their human resources policies, with potential benefits accruing to low-performing pupils. Then, we analyze the reallocations of educational resources required to equalize educational opportunities, and we find that the redistribution of non-monetary inputs could considerably reduce the magnitude of the financial redistribution needed.(ECON 3)--UCL, 200

Economic analysis of educational systems : a critical survey and an empirical assessment of the inequity of the Brazilian educational system.

Esta dissertação de mestrado consiste de uma resenha crítica da teoria econômica da educação no que se refere à análise de sistemas educativos, e de um estudo empírico do desempenho do sistema educativo brasileiro, com ênfase em indicadores de iniqüidade. Procura-se apresentar a evolução e o estado atual do debate relacionados aos seguintes assuntos: demanda por educação, oferta de educação (insumos monetários e não-monetários), arranjo institucional do sistema educativo, arranjo institucional sócio-econômico (em que se insere o sistema educativo), e os produtos do sistema educativo. Por fim, por meio da análise estatística de uma base de dados internacional (PISA 2000), apresenta-se um estudo empírico que visa a avaliar o desempenho do sistema educativo brasileiro, especialmente seu grau de iniqüidade.This MA dissertation thesis consists of a critical survey of the economics of education literature concerning educational system analysis, and of a study of the performance of the Brazilian educational system, with an emphasis in equity measurement. I discuss the evolution and the current state of the debate on the following subjects: demand for education, supply of education (monetary and non-monetary inputs), educational system institutional framework, socio-economic institutional framework (in which the educational system is imbedded), and the output of the educational system. Finally, by means of a statistical analysis of an international database (PISA 2000), I present an empirical study aiming at assessing the Brazilian educational system performance, especially its degree of inequity

Volet économique. Les enjeux de la polarisation dans la formulation des politiques actives

"Le volet économique de la recherche vise à cerner l'importance du contexte socio-économique "local" dans lequel opèrent les jeunes et les agents en charge d'appliquer les politiques d'insertion/formation [...] ce sujet est traité en trois temps : une revue de la littérature théorique et/ou étrangère sur le phénomène des appariements sélectifs, des mécanismes qui le sous-tendent (chap. 1); Une analyse, de cepoint de vue, des quelques données disponibles pour la Belgique et/ou la Communauté française (chap. 2) ; une discussion des implications de l'hypothèse d'inégalités de contexte local sur la nature des politiques sociales à mener (chap. 3)

What does it take to achieve equality of opportunity in education ? An empirical investigation based on Brazilian data

Roemer's [Roemer, J. (1998). Equality of opportunity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.] seminal work on equality of opportunity has contributed to the emergence of a theory of justice that is modern, conceptually clear and easy to mobilize in policy design. Inspired by Roemer's theory, this paper is fundamentally a policy-modeling exercise coupled to a micro data analysis. In a pure allocation setting, we first analyze the reallocations of educational expenditure required to equalize opportunities (taken to be test scores close to the end of compulsory education). Using Brazilian data, we find that implementing an equal-opportunity policy across pupils of different socio-economic background, by using per-pupil spending as the instrument requires multiplying by 6.8 on average the current level of spending on the lowest achieving pupils. This result is driven by the extremely low elasticity of scores to per-pupil spending. We then show that the simultaneous redistribution of monetary and non-monetary inputs, like peer group quality and school effectiveness, considerably reduces—by around 23%—the magnitude of financial redistribution needed

Etat des lieux de la mobilité des élèves en cours de scolarité primaire en Communauté française Wallonie-Bruxelles : Une analyse économique et quantitative

La recherche dont il est question ici a été développée suite à une commande du cabinet du Ministre de l’Enseignement fondamental. Elle vise à combler à contribuer à améliorer l’état de la réflexion et du débat sur la question de l'état des lieux de la mobilité des élèves en cours de scolarité primaire en Communauté française Wallonie – Bruxelles. Elle a été menée par des sociologiques et des économistes, ayant travaillé en étroite collaboration. Les uns et les autres ont eu recours à diverses méthodes pour développer chacune des facettes de la mobilité scolaire dans l’enseignement primaire

Ageing and employability. Evidence from Belgian firm-level data

The Belgian population is ageing due to demographic changes, so does the workforce of firms active in the country. Such a trend is likely to remain for the foreseeable future. And it will be reinforced by the willingness of public authorities to expand employment among individuals aged 50 or more. But are older workers employable? The answer depends to a large extent on the gap between older workers’ productivity and their cost to employers. To address this question we use a production function that is modified to reflect the heterogeneity of labour with workers of different age potentially diverging in terms of marginal products. Using unique firm-level panel data we produce robust evidence on the causal effect of ageing on productivity (value added) and labour costs. We take advantage of the panel structure of data and resort to first-differences to deal with a potential time-invariant heterogeneity bias. Moreover, inspired by recent developments in the production function estimation literature, we also address the risk of simultaneity bias (endogeneity of firm’s age-mix choices in the short run) using (1) the structural approach suggested by Ackerberg et al. Structural identification of production functions. Department of Economics, UCLA, (2006), (2) alongside more traditional system-GMM methods (Blundell and Bond in J Econom 87:115–143, 1998) where lagged values of labour inputs are used as instruments. Our results indicate a negative impact of larger shares of older workers on productivity that is not compensated by lower labour costs, resulting in a lower productivity-labour costs gap. An increment of 10 %-points of their share causes a 1.3–2.8 % contraction of this gap. We conduct several robustness checks that largely confirm this result. This is not good news for older individuals’ employability and calls for interventions in the Belgian private economy aimed at combating the decline of productivity with age and/or better adapting labour costs to age-productivity profiles

A política social e o conservadorismo econômico: O que revela o período recente

This text has two objectives that complement each other. First, to investigate the behavior of social policy and its consequences. Then to assess whether Brazilians became more conservative, despite the progress seen in social actions. As a methodology, a descriptive analysis of data from different sources is presented - National Household Sample Survey, Laboratory of Public Opinion in Latin America, Oxfam Brazil/Datafolha Institute - as well as a literature review on the 2013 protests. The results point to the progress of social policy with repercussions on the fall of poverty and inequality, however, with setbacks materializing in the Constitutional Amendment 95 and, in labor and social security reforms. Amid the inflection that started with the 2013 demonstrations, the available data on social preferences diverge, and it is not prudent to refute or corroborate the hypothesis of a wave of economic conservatism, although the election of a far-right government suggests a conservative attitude of society

Expansão da educação superior e progressividade do investimento público

This paper describes changes that occurred in the Brazilian tertiary education system considering information from household surveys and from administrative data collected by the Ministry of Education. A movement toward democratizing access occurred especially in public universities and in the period 2005-2015. As a result, a higher share of government investment in public universities has reached socially worse-off strata, and the public investments in tertiary education no longer contribute to increase income inequality