| Hello, *|NOME|* This end-of-year IMDS Letter has a special meaning. A communication vehicle created in September 2022, the IMDS Letter is already in its 34th Edition, bringing our readers fortnightly technical information about the work that IMDS develops, its results, and also bringing relevant points of reflection for all those who dream of a more prosperous, fairer Brazil with greater social mobility. We inaugurated 2023 by sending Edition number 9, “Programs need to be focused so as to fulfill their functions”, on January 10th. In it, we drew attention to the need to implant in the country a culture of permanent evaluation of social programs. We indicated that an experimental evaluation of the impact of the Criança Feliz Program (PCF), conducted between 2019 and 2021, showed that the program did not present, in the 30 municipalities in which it was evaluated, positive effects on child development. Throughout the rest of this year, we have dealt in our Letters with various topics such as the risk of loosing the macroeconomic opportunity set by the demographic bonus; the monetary poverty among children and adolescents; challenges our youngsters face; affirmative actions and the impact of quota policies, among others. We have brought unprecedented results of both social mobility at the base and at the top of the brazilian social pyramid. We have shown the risks of, as a country, aging before before becoming rich, and the enormous loss of income generation resulting from the low level of education of Brazilian youth. The year was very productive and IMDS added several articles, dashboards accompanied by presentations, Technical Notes and almost three dozen fortnightly letters to its portfolio. All this to amplify the dissemination of the theme of mobility and social development as a priority agenda in Brazil. We participated in the electoral process, offering our society the Panel of State Indicators, which brings together more than two hundred indicators in 11 thematic axes. We addressed topics such as school dropout; poverty among children and adolescentes; schooling of the young and the impact of their productivity and income-generation capacity, and a great deal more. All this production was duly disseminated on national media, in more than 140 exhibitions in the most respected media outlets in the country.
The year was really challenging; in addition to all the technical-scientific production, we made efforts to establish partnerships for technical support to states and municipalities, a guideline set by our Board of Directors. As a result, we signed Technical Cooperation Agreements (TCA) with the municipality of Rio de Janeiro and the states of Rio Grande do Sul and Mato Grosso do Sul. And we are in advanced negotiations with two other units of the federation. In the area of partnerships with academic centers of excellence, in addition to the long-standing partnership with FGV's Center for Empirical Studies in Economics, in which we developed the exploration of the databases of the Bolsa Família Program and RAIS, we made a technical partnership with two of the largest Brazilian universities, USP and UFRJ, enabling the joint realization of research projects of very high technical quality. In the sphere of communication and relationship, we are finalizing the construction of a new, more user-friendly, and more flexible website, to be inaugurated in the next two months, which will allow our users to download databases and navigate more easily and have access to more content than they do today. There is, therefore, much to celebrate in this our last Letter from IMDS of 2023! To the readers, we wish you all a happy holiday season and a 2024 full of hope, health, joy, and many, many achievements. See you in the next “Letter from IMDS”! Paulo Tafner CEO | 
