2025 - Edition 77 | August 05

In the midst of the pandemic, Arminio Fraga and Paulo Tafner created an institute dedicated to studies on mobility and social development in Brazil

Hello Leitor,

The year was 2020. The beginning was difficult and challenging. All work was remote. We recruited and hired technicians virtually, and it was only a year and a half later that the team got to know each other in person.

Thus, facing these adversities, IMDS was born creating dashboards that used microdata. The objective was to characterize the pattern of social mobility in Brazil, to present the bottlenecks that prevent greater social mobility - especially at the base of the household income pyramid, based on the identification of inequalities of opportunities that prevent the social ascension of sons and daughters of poor fathers and mothers --, and to identify the effects of poverty on the investment of families in their children.

While we started the technical activities, we developed the website with the objective of publicizing our production, since from the beginning we defined that the work should be disseminated in a transparent way to the largest possible number of people.

Counting on the invaluable partnership of Oppen Social, we extensively used the databases of the IBGE, Inep (National Institute of Educational Studies and Research Anísio Teixeira), Datasus and the identified databases of CadÚnico and the registry of beneficiaries of the Bolsa Família – the latter obtained from a technical cooperation agreement signed with the Ministry of Development and Social Assistance, Family, and Fight Against Hunger (MDS) - to produce dashboards that describe in graphic and tabular manner, the social phenomena listed above.

More recently, we redesigned and modernized the site to, among other improvements, allow the user to download aggregated data in demographic and territorial sections. Some of the themes explored in the IMDS dashboards are, in chronological order in which they were produced: a) intergenerational mobility in Brazil and in the world; b) inequalities of opportunities for children and adolescents and youth; c) abandonment and dropout in basic education; d) Bolsa Família: first generations; and e) inequality in the family budget.

This collection of indicators is currently composed of 21 dashboards, in which more than a thousand indicators were calculated from the microdata cited, and organized by sex, skin color or race, and territory. IMDS has a rigorous verification process to ensure the highest quality of information, which has enabled the institute to become a credible source of social data dissemination, a statement based on the approximately 350 journalistic articles published from the data from these dashboards and other publications. This is equivalent, in these five years of existence, to the publication of an average of one article per week citing the institute and its data.

In election years, IMDS sought to subsidize voters with information about their state, both in a temporal perspective and in comparison with other states, based on the social indicators gathered by thematic block (housing, health, education, labor, income, security) in the "IMDS Elections" dashboard. A large collection was comprised of the 2022 state elections and the 2024 municipal elections. For 2026, a new version will be available on our website.

Having as one of its strategies to influence managers to use evidence in the design of social programs, IMDS launched the Impact Platform subsite - a collection of more than 500 social programs evaluated in Brazil and around the world, organized in a didactic way so that managers and society can understand issues from different social angles: a) the purpose of the policy; b) the design of the intervention, and c) the measured impact effects.

Concerned with the environmental issue, we produce technical studies on extreme weather events and study the impact of these events on the vulnerable population and in particular on those who receive Bolsa Família. The first part of the study was dedicated to rural areas and in it we analyzed the impact of extreme droughts on the migration of individuals and families, analyzed by whether they were recipients or not of the Bolsa Família. The second stage, in final review for dissemination, will be focused on urban areas and, in this case, the extreme weather event considered will be rainfall.

Still within the strategy of influencing managers, IMDS signed a wide range of Technical Cooperation Agreements (TCAs) with various subnational entities seeking to assist them in the formulation and monitoring of public policies. We signed TCAs with the municipalities of Rio de Janeiro and Vitória (ES) and the state governments of Rio Grande do Sul, Piauí, Mato Grosso do Sul and São Paulo. In these TCAs, we had the opportunity to assist managers in the fight against failure and dropout, by developing a Failure Predictor that has greatly helped school management in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro and in the states of Rio Grande do Sul, Piauí and Mato Grosso do Sul. Also, as a result of these TCAs, we have supported the design of policies for the productive inclusion of young people, prevention of dropout and mapping of social assistance activity, x-raying and quantifying costs and identifying the public that have a demand for such services.

In a totally innovative way, in line with studies and research, we carried out the first work on the first generation of beneficiaries of the Bolsa Família Program. We identified that approximately 45% of the first beneficiaries of Bolsa Família (children who benefited from Bolsa Família in 2005) left the Program in 2019. We have also identified that the chance of these children entering the formal labor market as young adults depends a lot on the conditions of the supply of goods, equipment and social services in the municipalities where they have grown up.

Still in this line of studies, we sought to identify the effect of mass layoffs on the life of dismissed workers. The results reveal that depending on the sector of activity, the time needed to recover job and salary can vary from a few months to years and, in some cases, laid-off workers may actually never regain the initial situation.

Other interesting and intriguing studies have been carried out by IMDS in these five years of activity and can be found in the Publications and Indicators sections of our website.

More recently, we launched the Atlas of Social Mobility, a rich compendium of information on the chances of social mobility for children born in the 1980s, whose parents were among the poorest 50% at that time. The data is available for all municipalities in Brazil and has open access on the website.

It has been a joy and an inspiration to participate in the construction and development of this unique institution focused on mobility and social development. Our technical team is young, engaged and highly qualified, and has reaffirmed its commitment to the rigor and excellence of our studies and research. They are all equally engaged in technical support to the managers of subnational entities with which we have Technical Cooperation Agreements.

Coinciding with the institute's anniversary, we are honored to welcome economist Fernando Veloso, who assumes the position of Director of Research, brilliantly occupied by Sergio Guimarães during the initial years. Veloso arrives from FGV, where he coordinated the Regis Bonelli Productivity Observatory at FGV IBRE, and is the author of several articles published in national and international academic journals in the areas of economic growth and development, education and social mobility. He is also a first-time partner of IMDS, having been a member of the extinct Technical Advisory Council and also a member of the Technical-Scientific Committee that replaced it. Sergio Guimarães, in turn, continues to support IMDS as a member of the Scientific Technical Committee, along with economists Cecilia Machado and Marcos Lisboa.

May the next few years develop as the first ones did, with accomplishments, engagement and enthusiasm in achieving our goals that will ultimately weigh favorably in constructing our country into a more pleasant, fairer and more dynamic place.

See you in the next "IMDS Letter"!

Paulo Tafner

CEO