Health status impacts on individual earnings in Brazil

The aim of this paper is to estimate the impact of health conditions on the earnings of Brazilians. We have identified three ways through which health conditions affect workers’ earnings: labor force participation, hourly wages and weekly hours worked. A measure of the welfare reduction due to poor health conditions was created by aggregating individual losses. Individuals are classified as sick or healthy according to two criteria. Firstly, the clinical criterion which is based on the presence of chronic diseases or problems with physical mobility. Secondly, the subjective criterion which is based on the health self-assessment. Each Brazilian individual loses from R$6.30 to R$16.89 per week depending on individual characteristics. In relative terms these aggregated losses represent from 1.5% to 4.7% of the Brazilian GDP. The data base used in this work were PNAD/1998 (the Brazilian national household survey). In 1998, PNAD had an additional survey about health.

Aspectos teóricos e metodológicos da relação entre o estado de saúde e a desigualdade de renda

One of the main socioeconomic problems observed in most countries – particularly in less developed countries – is the presence of high income inequality and poverty level. Several empirical works have attempted to analyze their major determinants as well as their effect on some indicators related to social welfare, such as the level of economic growth, criminality rate, and health status. In Brazil, such issues are particularly relevant, since it possesses one of the worst income distributions in the world, whose Gini coefficient is around 0.607. This paper aims at studying the relationship between health status and income distribution, considering theoretical and metodological aspects of this analysis. On the one hand, income distribution may affect health status, since more unequal societies are characterized by the existence of social conflicts and lower social cohesion – which in turn affects the quality of individual relations. On the other hand, as it is one of the human capital components and directly affects the capacity of generating wage earnings, health may have impacts on income distribution.income distribution; health status; productivity; human capital; social capital

Social inequality in the access to healthcare services in Brazil

healthcare services; Brazil; social inequality

Custos da criminalidade em Belo Horizonte

This paper aims to measure violence costs in Belo Horizonte. We use accountability methodology to estimate violence costs in Belo Horizonte in 1999. We consider the following categories of costs: costs of lost lives, health treatment costs, public and private security costs, private insurance costs and the value of direct losses. Our findings suggest that R$ 835,000,000 (eight hundred and thirty five millions of reais) is the amount lost due to violence in Belo Horizonte. This value represents 4.1% of the municipal GDP in 1999.Violence, violence costs, welfare

Avaliação econômica de programas de prevenção e controle da criminalidade no Brasil

This paper provides the first estimates of the cost-effectiveness of crime prevention and control programs in Brazil. Although the analysis is not comprehensive or definitive, it is the first attempt to estimate the cost-effectiveness of such initiatives in a developing country. The paper adapts an evaluation methodology developed by Greenwood and others (1998) to estimate the costs effectiveness of crime and violence prevention interventions. Nine crime prevention and control programs are evaluated; these programs are being implemented in the cities of Belo Horizonte, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo. These interventions were chosen based on three criteria: availability of cost information, similarity to programs already evaluated in the international literature, and need to cover the three types of prevention interventions: primary, secondary, and tertiary. The estimates show that general, the prevention programs are more cost-effective than the control program considered. The secondary prevention programs spend the least resources per serious crime avoided.criminality; economic evaluation; crime prevention

Impactos da criminalidade no valor dos aluguéis em Belo Horizonte [Criminality: the impact on the residential rent prices in Belo Horizonte].

The aim of this paper is to measure part of the indirect costs of criminality in Belo Horizonte. The indirect costs are measured through the analysis of the impact of criminality in residential rent prices. The methodology used is Hedonic Price Models. This methodology allows us to obtain indirectly the price that individuals are able to pay to have access to some goods which markets do not exist. In this work we are interested in estimating the value that individuals pay to live in areas with a higher level of security. In this way we have a proxy to the amount that individuals are able to pay to reduce criminality. The estimation was done using Ordinary Least Squares. We estimated two models to account to different types of crimes: property crimes and murder. The results obtained show that criminality reduce rent prices. Depending on the geographic area, this reduction reaches 27% of full rental price.violence costs; hedonic prices; criminality