‘We spend, but don’t produce quality education’, says Paulo Tafner …

Founder and CEO of the recently launched Institute for Mobility and Social Development (IMDS), economist Paulo Tafner says that it is necessary to improve the quality of spending to ensure that Brazilians can compete on an equal footing in the labor market and ascend the social pyramid. Without social mobility, according to him, the country will have less potential for growth. Check the main excerpts of the interview:

What can be done?

There are relatively simple measures that can be suitable as public policy regardless of cash transfers. Mobility is basically taking children from families whose parents have low level of schooling and remuneration so that they can have a better chance of migrating to middle income and educational levels. Just as it will be important to see the opposite extreme. In a country with high mobility, more equal opportunities, you have people going from the low strata to the middle, there are the middle going to the rich and the opposite, the rich going to the middle strata. In the case of Brazil, everything suggests that the migration of the richest 1% is quite low. It means saying the following: it is basically the same families that have controlled wealth and access for decades, and that is not a good thing. What is good is to have mobility.