Dinâmica da (in)formalidade no mercado de trabalho brasileiro nos anos 2000: diferenciais de rendimentos e padrões de mobilidade

Abstract

The Brazilian labor market has experienced important changes over the 2000s presenting a contrary trend from the previous decade, with a significant decrease of informality rate associated to the rate of expansion of the formal employment. Moreover, changes related to the profile of the labor force also hat effects on the composition of the employed population. The increase of education reduces inequality since it reduces the heterogeneity between formal and informal workers, however, may have different effects on workers in different points of the earnings distribution. The appreciation of the minimum wage may increasing segmentation of the labor market at the bottom of earnings distribution and cause an increase in the gap between formal and informal work. On the other hand, it is argues that if the value of the minimum wage takes effect on the earnings of informal workers, then there would be a reduction in this gap. Faced with these changes comes the need for a repositioning of the discussion about the formal-informal dynamics of the Brazilian labor market. Using the data from the Demographic Census 2000 and 2010 and the decomposition method of Machado and Mata by quantile regression, adjusted for sample selection bias, it was found an increase in the gap between formal and informal workers at the bottom of earnings distribution due to the growth of segmentation effect and a progressive reduction in the gap along the distribution due to the changes in the relative composition between the groups, which were most relevant at the top than at the bottom distribution. However, there are important differences between salaried employment without registration and self-employment relatively to the formal employment as well as by gender concerning the importance and variation of these components along the distribution. Using data from the Monthly Employment Survey (PME) for the period 2002 to 2012 and estimating the probabilities of transition between different occupational status, it was found a high degree of mobility from unemployment to formal employment in the period, but the results suggest the persistence of mobility patterns since the transition probabilities for the formality from any source status is significantly greater for individuals with better attributes. The resulting earnings mobility of these transitions confirms the appreciation of formal employment relatively to informality, especially in the lower quantiles of earnings distribution. In this sense, it is concluded that the reduction in the gaps over the quantiles, mainly on the upper, can be justified largely by the relative improvement in the attributes of informal workers, especially in the education level, than because of changes in patterns occupational mobility, and that formalization is an exit to the precariousness especially for workers in the lower income strata. The diversity of the changes observed in the formal-informal dynamics of the labor market in the last decade highlights the challenges inherent to the elimination of job precariousness in Brazil.