The Impact of Interest in School on Educational Success in Portugal

Notwithstanding increased educational expenditure, Portugal continues to record poor educational outcomes. Underlining the weak expenditure-educational success link, a large body of work in educational economics displays that there is a tenuous relationship between a range of school inputs and cognitive achievement. Among others, the inability to establish a clear link between inputs and success has been attributed to the difficulty of controlling for unobserved attributes such as ability, motivation and interest. Against this background, and inspired by a large body of work in educational psychology which explicitly measures constructs such as educational motivation and interest, this paper examines whether a child’s interest in school has any bearing on educational success after controlling for the kinds of variables typically used in educational economics analyses. We rely on two data sets collected in Portugal in 1998 and 2001 and examine the interest-educational success link using both cross-section and panel data. Our estimates suggest that after controlling for time-invariant unobservable traits and for the simultaneous determination of interest and achievement, there is little support for the idea that prior interest in school has a bearing on future educational success.schooling, Portugal, educational outcomes, interest in school

An Overview on child Labour Determinants : The Portuguese case

On studying child labour, most efforts have been dedicated to focus on developing countries as they face the most severe realities. This has currently led to the negligence of similar realities in the so-called First World, endangering youngsters. In this paper, I go through the main child labour determinants and analyse its relevance for the Portuguese case. I conclude that child labour in developed countries is still mainly linked with the economically, socially and culturally less privileged, in spite of being less deterministic than the developing countries' reality

Co-production and Voice in Policymaking: Participatory Processes in the European Periphery

Co-production is now the gold standard in policymaking, characterised by national and international actors with different types of knowledge working together to contribute to a collaborative decision-making process. The benefits of co-production in policymaking can include improved knowledge generation that merges practice-centred, political and technical knowledge and incorporates local knowledges to provide complementary information and increase ownership over policymaking processes. Nevertheless, it can also present pitfalls such as multiple and diverging interests, incomplete and asymmetric information, and resource asymmetries and elite capture as highlighted by Bender in (Eur J Dev Res, 2022). By reviewing a case in the European periphery, we document and illustrate situations of collaboration and conflict, benefits and pitfalls resulting from policymaking co-production, throughout recent Portuguese history and in present-day participatory budget initiatives. From competing national actors to influences from the Global North and Global South, the f inal outcome reflects a learning process in collaboration but also underlying power strugglesinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Portuguese data on child work: what does it encompass

After the analysis of different meanings of child work, we go through neoclassical microeconomic model and its insufficiencies in explaining this phenomenon. Focusing in the Portuguese case, we use the data available to depict the distinctive characteristics of working and nom-working children. We conclude that even in developed countries child labour is still mainly linked with the economically, socially and culturally less privileged

Integrating knowledge forms in public transport planning and policies: the case of the Lisbon metropolitan area

Public policy debates about transport planning are often focused on more technical analyses to the detriment of other forms of knowledge. Combining document analysis and interviews with relevant actors, we identify a clear imbalance in the design of transport planning in Lisbon’s Metropolitan Area. There is a clear prevalence of political knowledge, with conflict among key actors as the major source of knowledge and the neglect of other forms, particularly those associated with deliberative processes. The findings also suggest that these imbalances decrease the legitimacy and optimality of potential solutions to complex problems in Lisbon’s transport policy.This work was supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia [UIDB/00713/2020, UIDB/CPO/00758/2020]