| Hello, *|NOME|* What are the chances of a child who spends childhood and adolescence in a poor family to ascend socially and become a fully inserted adult in the labor market, occupying a position with high productivity, exercising a profession with social status, and having a formal job? IMDS has tried to answer this question in several ways. One of them has been by exploring the PNAD database (National Household Sample Survey), IBGE. Some of our studies used the PNADs of 1996 and 2014. We know, for example, that for those born in the 1980s, 32% of the children of uneducated parents were in a position of employee in the formal labor market and 5% were civil servants or military personnel (see the full panel here). This information, however, is extracted from questionnaires applied to adults, who must remember facts that had occurred twenty or thirty years before and who may have some bias which may lead to inaccurate answers regarding the education of those responsible. Therefore, another database on which the IMDS has focused on is the payroll of the Bolsa Família Program (PBF), a program that since 2004 transfers income to poor families. For this, we have conducted a sequence of studies with children who were between 7 and 16 years of age in 2005 and who were in families benefiting from the PBF at the time. As each child has a Social Identification Number (NIS), one can find them in other records where the NIS is a variable. Linking the PBF payroll with the CadÚnico (Single Registry of Social Programs), we can study a specific dimension of intergenerational social mobility, which is the chance of a child under the conditions described above, times later no longer being dependent on social programs. In this case, the metric used to indicate program dependency is for them to be in Cadúnico. We produce dashboards with these statistics and a presentation with the main results. Today we know that 65.6% of those children were, in 2019, outside the CadÚnico, a very significant intergenerational mobility at the base of the pyramid. As the study was done for the year 2019, and in the following two years we had the coronavirus pandemic (which mainly affected the poorest), it is likely that most of these have returned to dependence on government aid. The impact on the labor market, resulting from the pandemic, was pedagogical in the sense of remembering that poverty and vulnerability are not identical phenomena. The former can be relieved with an income transfer program, such as the PBF. The second, however, can only be properly cared for with comprehensive safety systems that can, when necessary, cover the risks of those most exposed to sudden impoverishment. In particular, we saw that in 2021, when Emergency Aid was discontinued, poverty increased substantially, as analyzed here. It is known that formal workers have mechanisms to protect against claims of various natures – for example, unemployment is covered by both unemployment insurance and FGTS. Health events are covered by the pension system. The mere signing a formal contract in the labor market already confers the contracting of such insurance. Informal workers, on the other hand, do not have access to these mechanisms. Thus, the access of poor children to the formal labor market, as adults, indicates social mobility in a more robust way than the mere exit from CadÚnico. The possibility of crossing two single administrative records, the PBF payroll of 2005 and the Annual Social Information Report (RAIS) from 2015 to 2019, the database of all formal workers in Brazil, allows us to observe that initial generation in two moments of time: in 2005, when they were between 7 and 16 years of age, and in 2015-19, when some of them may have gone through RAIS, between the ages of 17 and 30.
In a first block of studies published in a report in the newspaper "Valor Econômico", we explored how the chance of being a young adult occupying a formal job varies among those adults who were, as children, beneficiaries of the Bolsa Família. The Bolsa Família Program, despite its conditionalities associated with schooling, is not a guarantee that a productive adult with formal job will emerge. The program is designed to alleviate poverty – especially for families with children. As a remedy against long-term poverty, mere cash transfers are not enough. Among those 2005 poor children, 44.7% managed to enter the formal market at least once, between 2015 and 2019. Of these, 66% were found to be there for three years or more, which indicates a certain solidity in the productive insertion. Considering that we are dealing with young people at the beginning of the active life cycle, the result in a way is quite surprising. A great advantage of the administrative record in relation to the sample data is that it allows the calculation of the formalization rate at the municipal level. In particular, it allows us to explore territorial heterogeneities from an analytical point of view: nearby municipalities may have very different formalization rates. For example, of the children from Sobral (CE) who were in the PBF in 2005, 44% were found at some point working in a formal post (which is close to the national average, but above the Ceará average of 38.7%). Santana do Acaraú, a municipality bordering Sobral, presented only 27% of formalization of its children from the PBF. Several factors explain such large differences in chances to ascend socially. If we order the more than five thousand Brazilian municipalities by the rate of formalization of these children as adults, the first quintile (the 20% worst in the indicator) was found to have an average IDEB (the Basic Education Development Index) of 2.8 in 2005, while the top 20% municipalities had a 4.2 IDEB. This shows that the quality of the formative environment is correlated to subsequent success. The success in future social mobility in a municipality is also associated with the 2005 poverty rate, the illiteracy rate of adults, infant mortality, among other indicators that reflect the environment of social precariousness influencing the formation of those children and adolescents. The panels associating the Bolsa Família payroll and RAIS can be found here and the presentation can be seen here. See you in the next “IMDS Letter”! Paulo Tafner CEO |
