| Hello, *|NOME|* The beginning of August marked the four years of the creation of IMDS. For all of us, it was and has been a source of satisfaction to participate in the creation and growth of the institute. In addition to the public utility service we provide with the availability of our data, the support to state and municipal governments and research in the area of social mobility and program evaluation, we can say that what we do is inspiring: applying the scientific method to relevant issues that have the potential to generate social mobility for the poorest. Every time we have a birthday, it is healthy to "turn on the lantern at the stern", as the economist and diplomat Roberto Campos (1917-2001) wrote, to illuminate the past. That is the exercise we try to do in this letter. To do so, we will use the first person plural, to give a collective tone to the project. IMDS was created in August 2020, in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic. We were coming from quite a hard-won battle: research, proposition, and advocacy work that resulted in the Social Security Reform project. It ended up subsidizing a significant part of the government's proposal that, in 2019, became the Proposed Amendment to the Constitution - (PEC) 103, of November 2019. In our humble opinion, the PEC was not better only because government officials and congressmen did not agree to implement a capitalization system that every day proves not only to be necessary, but really fundamental to definitively stop the gigantic deficit of Social Security. In any case, at the end of that year, the conviction was established that Brazil needed greater social mobility in order to face the terrible challenges of poverty and gigantic inequality. This is how IMDS was born, an institute focused on designing, testing, proposing and disseminating public policies with an impact on mobility and social development (see the institute's letter of intent here). The initial strategy was to promote and carry out work, based on microdata from statistical surveys and administrative records, which had the following objectives: (i) to characterize the pattern of social mobility in Brazil; (ii) present the bottlenecks for greater social mobility, especially at the base of the per capita household income pyramid, based on the identification of the various inequalities of opportunities that prevent the social ascension of sons and daughters of poor parents; and (iii) identify the effects of poverty on the investment of families in their children. With this, dashboards were produced, which describe in a graphical and tabular way the social phenomena studied. All dashboards are fully accessible through the website, thus constituting a public good. Recently, IMDS redesigned the website to allow users to download aggregated data in demographic and territorial areas. This collection of indicators is currently composed of 21 dashboards, in which more than a thousand indicators are calculated from the microdata cited, and organized by territory, sex, and skin color or race. IMDS has a rigorous verification process before the publication of the indicators, which has enabled the institute to become a credible source of dissemination of social data, portrayed through the 330 journalistic articles produced from the data of these dashboards, which is equivalent, in these four years of existence, to the publication of 1.5 articles per week using data from the institute and citing it as a source (this collection can be accessed here). The availability of statistics in a disaggregated way in the territory (many of the dashboards are presented at the municipal level) allowed us to open a dialogue with local governments. Initially, from the elaboration of the Evidence Award and the IMDS Trophy, whose purpose is the recognition of social policies designed with the robust use of evidence. As part of the strategy of influencing local managers through the use of evidence in the design of social programs, IMDS launched a subsite called Impact Platform (here), a collection of more than 300 social programs evaluated in Brazil and around the world, organized in a didactic way so that managers and society can understand the purpose of the policy, the design of the intervention and the measured impact effects. The holding of national and international seminars was also an important component of the information dissemination strategy (examples can be found here). As of 2023, IMDS began a process of approaching state and municipal governments identified as having transformative potential and that were willing to innovate in social policy. Thus, Technical Cooperation Agreements (TCAs) were signed in which the IMDS technical team provides scientific and methodological support aimed at the elaboration, together with the technical team of the local government, of socioeconomic diagnosis and/or design and/or monitoring and/or evaluation of social programs. It is important to highlight, in this regard, that IMDS, when signing TCAs with subnational governments, does not have any remuneration, that is, the cost of the technical support is financed by the institute itself. Currently, IMDS has six TCAs in progress (four with state governments and two with municipal governments). In the state of Piauí, a partnership was signed to support the state management with regard to the design, monitoring and evaluation of programs on four fronts: child health, education, prevention of youth violence, and territorial planning and monitoring. In this first year (the agreement was signed in February 2024), the institute, in partnership with the Department of Education and the Department of Planning, is evaluating the expansion of full-time education under the dimensions of academic performance and school abandonment. In the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, IMDS is carrying out a social diagnosis in the territory of Vale da Celulose. The objective is to prepare the state for the social consequences of the installation of large industrial pulp enterprises in the state, in order to provide inclusive development In the state of Rio Grande do Sul, IMDS provided, throughout 2023, support on three fronts: school dropout in high school, professional training programs, and early childhood development. In the state of São Paulo, the focus is on the vocational training of young people and adults. IMDS is supporting the State Secretariat for Economic Development in the development of a policy that integrates training and intermediation of labor, aimed at the different target audiences that benefit most from this type of strategy. At the municipal level, our TCA with the Rio Department of Education involves the development of a statistical tool that is capable of identifying students more likely to fail, while the TCA with the Municipality of Vitória (ES) provides for the development of a methodology to estimate the cost by type of service provided by Social Assistance. It is important to note that IMDS does all this without public resources. The government counterpart is in their giving permission for the products developed as a result of the agreements to be published, with adaptations, on the www.imdsbrasil.org website, so that they can serve as a methodological benchmark for public management in Brazil. Although it is not the central objective of the institute to produce academic research, everything we do involves applying the scientific method to practical problems. We have instituted the IMDS/SBE Award, with editions already held in 2022 and 2023 (and ongoing for 2024) for research in the area of micro econometrics that deal with topics associated with social mobility, and we have carried out some research projects that result from our support to the aforementioned governments. Some examples are here and here. Others are idealized from conception as academic projects: here and here. Finally, it is important to note that IMDS has a Board of Directors engaged in the purpose of ensuring that the institute does not distance itself from its mission, and recently started to have a Technical-Scientific Committee, formed by senior economists, whose purpose is to propose new themes and participate in the idealization of ongoing projects. See you at the next “Letter from IMDS”! Paulo Tafner CEO |
