O impacto do Programa Bolsa Família sobre indicadores educacionais dos jovens brasileiros

Abstract

The Brazil’s Bolsa Família Program aims to promote social development and poverty alleviation through direct transfer of income, in combination with other social programs. This study was designed to examine whether the Bolsa Família Program increases the child's chance to be enrolled in school, which is one of the conditionalities of the program, and whether it reduces the child's probability to attend school being the child out of the grade suitable for his/her age (situation of age-grade distortion). The main hypotheses are that the child living at a family benefited from the Bolsa Família Program has a greater chance of attending school and less likely to be within the group of age-grade distortion.In the main analysis, it was used the micro-data of Demographic Census 2010, collected by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). Descriptive analyses and binary logistic regression models were estimated for the dependent variables "be enrolled in school" and "be in situation of age-grade distortion", and such dichotomous variables have the value 0 or 1. Analyses took into account different limits of per capita household income, census and age situations. These estimates were carried out by comparing children who were part of households that declared themselves beneficiaries (treatment group) with those that were not beneficiaries of the Bolsa Família Program (control group). It was also considered as controls characteristics of the household, of the child, of the family background and the municipality of residence, once the Demographic Census does not have information about the schools. In all models the beneficiary children in the program were more likely to be in school, compared to non-beneficiary children in the Bolsa Família Program, confirming the low leakage of the program. The same was not observed for age-grade distortion, considering that for some cases there were not differences among the chances of being outdated between groups. When performing the analysis by cohort study, we found that as increasing the age of the child, the chance of being in distortion situation also increased. However, there is a time effect that should not be overlooked. Thus, the greater the chances of failure as time goes by. In addition, because of the condition to be enrolled to receive the aid, beneficiary children evade the system in less proportion, and therefore increase their chance of distortion compared to the control group, which does not have this constraint.