| Hello, *|NOME|* The IMDS has directed a special look to the first generations of dependent beneficiaries on the Bolsa Família Program (PBF), as a way to measure possible social mobility at the base of the social pyramid and the long-term dependence on the Program. We have already spoken of this project in another letter. We studied the trajectory of children and young people between 7 and 16 years of age in 2005, who at the time were dependent beneficiaries of the program and followed them until 2019. We found that the average frequency with which a 2005 beneficiary child became an adult belonging to a beneficiary family of the program in 2019 was 20.4%. Evidence suggests that place of residence strongly influences the likelihood of remaining in poverty for more than a generation. While the lowest frequency of permanence found was in Santa Catarina (only 6.9% of dependent children in 2005 were adult beneficiaries in 2019), this proportion reached 30.1% in Piauí. We also identified that the propensity to intergenerational dependence on transfer programs is associated with the schooling of the responsible beneficiaries in 2005: in Piauí, for example, 35.7% of children whose parents left school before completing elementary school became adults dependent on the program; compared to 22 percent of those whose parents had a high school education. That is, the chance of dependence decreases with the higher education of the person in charge. Another important fact about this contingent of children who have become dependent adults is that, on average, in Brazil, 69% are the holders of beneficiaries, that is, they have formed new poor families, with or without children. Moreover, 86% of these new beneficiaries have fathered children, the latter being therefore representatives of the third generation of beneficiaries dependent on the program. Analysis from the numbers displayed in our panels allows us to additionally discover that the combination of sex and skin color/race is strongly associated with intergenerational permanence in the program: 36% of non-white girls who were dependent in 2005, are dependent as adults. White men in the same condition in 2005 are much less likely to be dependent as adults, at just 12 percent. This difference remains even when controlling for the region of residence of the dependent in 2005. In the Northeast, 42.7% of dependent non-white girls in 2005 will still be dependent in 2019 (compared to 23.6% of white men). In the South, a region with the lowest rate of intergenerational dependence on program transfers, 6.2% of dependent white boys in 2005 became dependent adults, compared to 22.3% of non-white girls. There is, however, nothing deterministic about poverty. Public policies to improve education and health, if accompanied by economic growth, seem to indicate a change in the intergenerational trajectory of a poor family. It is known, thanks in part to the contribution of the IMDS, that the majority (64%) of dependent children in 2005 left CadÚnico in 2019, and that 46% were found occupying formal jobs between 2015 and 2019. While it can be argued that the first result does not mean upward mobility, the presence in RAIS unequivocally points to the social ascension of a group that was quite vulnerable in childhood. Soon, we will launch a new wave of results on the productive insertion of the first generation of PBF dependents, in which we characterize the employment of this cohort in comparison with formal employees who have never been in families benefiting from the PBF, in the same age group, in the period 2015-2019. That is, we took the people listed in RAIS in this period who were aged between 21 and 30 years and separated them into two groups: those who have already passed through as a beneficiary family of the PBF and those who have never done so. Once this was done, we compared salary ranges, quality of occupation, time in the last job and size of the company where they last worked, between the two groups.
We invite our readers to keep an eye on our portal to delve into these new results, as well as visit the previous results of this sequence of studies in IMDS dashboards (see here) and presentations (here and here). See you in the next “Letter from IMDS”! Paulo Tafner CEO | 
