Many researchers have shown that Brazil?s Bolsa Família programme had a large impact on reducing poverty and income inequality. But evidence for the programme?s impact on educational outcomes is in short supply. Does Bolsa Família increase school enrolment? Does it reduce dropout rates? Does it improve grade promotions? (...)What Is the Impact of the Bolsa Família Programme on Education?

Ana Lúcia Kassouf

Paul Glewwe

English

Research Papers in Economics

International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth (IPC - IG)
Poverty Practice, Bureau for Development Policy, UNDP
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The International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth is jointly supported
by the Poverty Practice, Bureau for Development Policy, UNDP
and the Government of Brazil.
   March , 2010
No. 107
What Is the Impact of the
Bolsa Família Programme on Education?
by Paul Glewwe, Department of Applied Economics, University of Minnesota and Ana Lúcia Kassouf, Department of Economics, Esalq-University of São Paulo
Many researchers have shown that Brazil’s Bolsa Família
programme had a large impact on reducing poverty and income
inequality. But evidence for the programme’s impact on educational
outcomes is in short supply. Does Bolsa Família increase school
enrolment? Does it reduce dropout rates? Does it improve
grade promotions?
The main barriers to children’s enrolment in school are the direct
costs (school fees, books, uniforms and so on) and the opportunity
cost of time in school. The latter refers to alternative paid and
unpaid work that could have been performed. Several countries
have ended fees or have provided free meals and uniforms.
Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programmes such as Bolsa Família
are in place to encourage families to send their children to school.
CCTs have two objectives: (i) alleviation of poverty today; and
(ii) higher investment in the human capital of poor children so as to
increase their well-being when they are adults. The first objective is
met when poor families receive programme payments. The second
is achieved by conditioning those payments on certain behaviours,
mainly enrolling children in school.
Bolsa Família, which started in the 1990s and expanded rapidly in 2001
and 2002, provides monthly cash payments to poor households if
their children (between the ages of 6 and 15) are enrolled in school.
By 2007, more than 11 million families (about 46 million people, a
quarter of Brazil’s population) received payments. The government
budget for the programme was more than 7.5 billion reais
(about US$4 billion) in 2006, which was 0.35 per cent of GNP.
Glewwe and Kassouf (2008) examined the impact of Bolsa Família
on children’s progress in school. Eight years of school census data
(1998–2005) were used to create a panel of public schools with
grades 1–4 and 5–8. The estimation method used compared
changes in enrolment, dropout and grade advancement rates
across schools that adopted the programme at different times.
Glewwe and Kassouf estimate that, after accounting for cumulative
effects, Bolsa Família has increased enrolment rates by about 5.5
percentage points in grades 1–4 and by about 6.5 percentage points
in grades 5–8. They also found that the programme has lowered
dropout rates by about 0.5 percentage points for children in
grades 1–4 and by about 0.4 percentage points for children
in grades 5–8. The programme raised grade promotion rates
by about 0.9 percentage points for children in grades 1–4
and by 0.3 percentage points for those in grades 5–8.
Only about a third of Brazil’s children participate in Bolsa Família.
It is reasonable to assume that these programme impacts are due
only to the effect of Bolsa Família on participants, with no effect on
non-participants. This implies that the impact of participating in
the programme is about three times higher than these estimates.
Hence the long-run effect of the programme seems to be to increase
participants’ enrolment rates by about 18 percentage points, to
reduce dropout rates by 1.5 percentage points, and to raise grade
promotion rates by 2 percentage points.
Brazil’s ethnic groups differ in many ways, including education
outcomes. The 2004 National Household Sample Survey (PNAD)
reports that white children aged 7–15 have a school enrolment
rate of 97.3 per cent. The rates for blacks, mulattos and indigenous
children of that age group are lower: 93.6 per cent, 95.2 per cent
and 89.6 per cent, respectively. The rate for Asian children,
97.6 per cent, is slightly above that for white children. The results
show that Bolsa Família is more effective at increasing the enrolment
of blacks, mulattos and indigenous children than it is for whites,
and thus it appears to be equalising enrolment by race.
While these impacts cast a favourable light on Bolsa Família,
simple calculations based on the enrolment impacts suggest
that the likely benefits in terms of increased wages may not
exceed the programme’s costs. Its long-run effect seems to be
increasing participants’ enrolment rates by about 18 percentage
points, which implies that 82 per cent of beneficiaries would have
enrolled in school even without Bolsa Família. The income transfer,
however, could be viewed as a benefit solely on distributional
grounds. This raises the question of whether Bolsa Família can be
targeted towards those households that would not enrol their
children in the absence of the programme. Answering this question
is an important task for further research.
Reference:
Glewwe, P. and A. L. Kassouf (2008). The Impact of the Bolsa Escola/Familia Conditional Cash Transfer Program
on Enrollment, Drop Out Rates and Grade Promotion in Brazil. Department of Applied Economics,
University of Minnesota.

What Is the Impact of the Bolsa Família Programme on Education?

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What Is the Impact of the Bolsa Família Programme on Education?

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