Where Are the Jobs that Take People Out of Poverty in Brazil?

In Brazil?s urban areas, job opportunities determine economic mobility and poverty. But not every job provides enough earnings to take families out of poverty. Jobs for poor workers are scarce in the formal sector. To improve their income, the poor resort to informal, unregistered jobs that are highly vulnerable. The contribution of informal jobs to poverty reduction should not be neglected.Where Are the Jobs that Take People Out of Poverty in Brazil?

Do Changes in the Labour Market Take Families out of Poverty? Determinants of Exiting Poverty in Brazilian Metropolitan Regions

The objective of this Working Paper is to estimate the likelihood of the exit of households from poverty and identify the determinants of this transition, taking into consideration the length of time that households have spent in poverty. Our focus is to analyze whether short-term changes in the labour market affect the probability of exiting or remaining in poverty. We use the only panel data that are available in Brazil for carrying out this kind of analysis: the Monthly Employment Survey (PME), which was conducted from March 2002 to May 2007. However, since this survey follows households for a very short period of time, we had to adopt estimation techniques that control for cases of right- and left-censoring. The most important results in this Working Paper are: 1) the longer the spell of poverty, the lower the probability of exiting it; 2) households that entered into poverty with zero income (namely, their poverty income gap was equal to one) are not those with the lowest probability of exiting this condition; 3) changes in the unemployment rate of household members do not directly affect the duration of the household?s poverty; and 4) the increase of the average wage of informal workers has a significant, positive effect on the probability of the exit of poor households from poverty.Duration of poverty spell; Poverty exit; Labour market; Survival models for left-censored data.

Self-employment in Brazil and its determinants: a spatial analysis

In this paper, we intend to identify some factors underlying the different rates of participation of self-employed workers in Brazilian municipalities. In contrast with previous analysis, our study is sensitive to the spatial dimension of self-employment in Brazil. Relying on geo-referenced data from areal units, our approach avoids the restrictive assumptions of independence between area effects. Two different approaches to spatial analysis are exploited, Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis (ESDA) and Spatial Econometrics. We show that substantial geographical heterogeneity in rates of self-employment exists within Brazil. The results point to the presence of clusters of municipalities with similar rates of participation of self-employment in the economy. The fitting of a spatial lag model to the data demonstrates that significant part of variation in self-employment is explained by spatial dependence. In addition, the municipality's degree of urbanization, rate of employment in the secondary sector as well as GDP per capita among others, indeed influences its rate of self-employment. We conclude that spatial analysis can provide useful insights in analyzing self-employment in Brazil.Brazil; self-employment

Trade liberalization and labor market in Brazil: impacts on employment and wages in tradeables and nontradeables sectors

The aim of this paper is to analyze the impacts of openness on employment and wages, taking into consideration two crucial aspects. The first, related to labor demand, refers to an increase in the relative employment of less-skilled workers. With Brazil being a developing country with abundant less-skilled labor, it can be expected – based on H-O-S – that income redistribution in favor of unskilled labor may occur after the trade liberalization. The second aspect is the impact on tradeables and non-tradeables. The H-O-S model implicitly admits tradeables goods only. However, the effect on the labor market is also felt on the non-tradeables sector. This aspect has been neglected in the analyses concerning this subject in the Brazilian economy. The conclusion raises the point that it is difficult to define any prevalence of labor demand shifts in the tradeables or nontradeables sectors. However, when the analysis is carried out after breaking down data based on levels of education, it is possible to conclude that the demand for unskilled workers increased after trade liberalization in Brazil. Nevertheless, demand shifts among sectors suggest that H-O-S framework does not explain the impacts of trade liberalization in Brazil, since the demand for skilled workers increased among the same sectors. This data, however, needs to be looked at with caution since the stabilization in Brazil (1994) changed income distribution by means and through the effects of an inflation tax and forced saving.Trade Liberalization; Employment; Wages; Labor Market

Fluctuations and persistence in poverty: a transient-chronic decomposition model for pseudo-panel data

Although many studies addressed poverty issues, very few of then did analyze the transient or persistent nature of this phenomenon. Encouraged by this lack of dynamic poverty analyses, the objective of this paper is to evaluate which features determine the relative position and the dynamics of the destitution state of the individual. Due to the scarcity of panel surveys in Brazil, it was used a pseudo-panel obtained from the Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicílios (PNAD/IBGE) database in this study. With these data, the state permanence and the state transience probabilities were estimated in a Markov matrix with the application of a bivariate probit model with endogenous switching for grouped data. It was chosen as the welfare indicator the per capita household income, which was analyzed in relation to a relative poverty line. Moreover, in order to verify the sensibility of the parameters estimated in the econometric analysis, distinct poverty lines were used and also different assumptions of household scale economies and of intrahousehold relative costs were made. The transient-chronic analysis is based on the distinction between stationary and transient components of intertemporal propensity to poverty. The results enabled to identify which groups in the population were especially sensitive to the chronic and to the transient types of poverty.chronic poverty; transient poverty; state persistence; state transition; endogenous switching probit model; pseudo-panel; Brazil

Análise da composição do rendimento do trabalhador empregado no Brasil: uma abordagem de oferta, demanda e instituições (1992-2001)

This paper presents a framework that emphasizes the role of supply and demand factors and the interaction of market forces and labor market institutions, developed by Katz and Autor (1999) and called Supply-Demand-Institutions (SDI). We have applied it for the Brazilian case in the years 1992 to 2001. PNAD (National Household Survey) is the data source. We have estimated wage equations with regressors that describe individual, industrial and union characteristics. The results show that wages are more influenced by market factors than institutional factors in Brazil.

Desemprego: evidências da duração no Brasil metropolitano

This work has as its objective to estimate the expected unemployment duration and to verify the reason for which the individual has difficulty of finding a new job in metropolitan Brazil in the year of 1999. For this purpose, we use the micro data’s of the Monthly Employment Survey (PME). The results obtained through the estimador of Kaplan-Meier show that the probability of the unemployed individuals stay in the unemployment state for at least 6 months is 48.83% and 25.10% for at least 1 year. On average unemployment duration is, approximately, 10 months. The parametric and extended parametric duration models allow to conclude that the individuals with grade levels of elementary and junior high school, with larger time of not- work, in son's condition and those resident in the metropolitan area of Rio de Janeiro have smaller probability of finding a new job, while those that never worked with remuneration, those that receive FGTS in the last job, residents in the metropolitan areas of Recife, Salvador and Belo Horizonte have larger probability of leaving the state unemployment.unemployment duration; labor market

Poverty dynamics in Brazilian metropolitan areas: An analysis based on Hulme and Shepherd's categorization (2002–2011)

AbstractEver-more sophisticated studies on the methodological approach and the conceptual scope of poverty have led to a consensus among scholars on the dynamic characteristic of this phenomenon – in other words, the existence of an in-and-out of privation movement of individuals and families. Within this context, Hulme and Shepherd (2003) defined five groups according to the location of the punctual and average indicators of poverty vis-à-vis the poverty line. This paper's objective is to adapt this typology to Brazil, using PME (Monthly Job Survey) micro-data for the 2002–2011 timeframe and the six Brazilian Metropolitan Regions covered by PME as well as, by estimating a multinomial logit, investigate which family characteristics relate to a greater or lesser chance of belonging to each of the chronic and transitory poverty categories. Categorization allows observation that, despite a sweeping across-the-board decline in the percentage of families in all poverty categories in the past decade, those families always or usually poor display demographic, socioeconomic, access to and insertion into the labor market categories which differ from families in transitory poverty or classified as never poor. Moreover, Northeastern metropolitan regions (Salvador and Recife) have higher percentages of chronic or transitory poverty. Multinomial logit estimates make it possible to verify that families whose members have completed secondary schooling or college or hold a higher-qualified occupation stand lesser chances of entering into or remaining in poverty. Results call for differentiating among poor families, as they enter into or leave poverty – which is tantamount to saying that the dynamics of poverty must be taken into account as public policies are drawn up

Horas de trabalho: efeitos idade, período e coorte [Working hours: the effects of age, period and cohort].

This article analyzes the evolution of working hours in Brazil from 1981 to 1999. The data are based on the PNAD (Household National Survey). The econometric model used has its grounds on the methodology age-period-cohort, which allows us not only to analyze the effects related to individual and job position aspects, but also to identify standards of working hours evolution through generations and life cycles. These effects - age, period and cohort - are relevant to the better understanding of recent working hours in Brazil. In general, the evolution of these effects is related to aspects of labor supply and demand and to institutional factors.working hours; Brazil

Quels sont les emplois qui permettent à la population de sortir de la pauvreté au Brésil ?

Quels sont les emplois qui permettent à la population de sortir de la pauvreté au Brésil ?