Alguns aspectos sobre demandas sociais: educação, habitação e saúde

Abstract

This thesis comprises three manuscripts related to education, housing and health care. In spite of an apparent distinction, the themes show similarities when evaluated in the face of social necessities of a population. These are demands unanimously understood as State responsibility and as an operational instrument for monitoring the social reality, as a means to formulate and reformulate public policies (Jannuzi, 2001). The intention was not to choose a broad theme, since there are many different points of view concerning social development policies. Rather, the aim was to contribute in the structuration of the social diagnostics to be used in future studies.The first manuscript deals with estimation methodologies of school level indicators, and the methodology proposed is distinct from that nowadays used by official organs. Indicator estimates by means of the currently available methodologies commonly result in values that are theoretically unacceptable. The intention was to make databases compatible in order to correct for such deficiencies. In this article, calculation procedures for these estimations were defined, refining methodologies and concepts, so that they might be utilized and replicated, using as inputs the databases from the School and Population Censuses. The methodologies could be successfully applied and it was seen that school attendance in the South and Southeast States is almost or already 100% in Brazil. On the other hand, in the Northeast and North regions, school attendance is still inadequate, and specific government policies are justified.Although housing is currently an issue widely discussed in Brazil, most housing quantitative studies include issues such as housing deficit and assessment of the housing stock. The demographic demand for households, considered as the need of new housings resulting from the demographic dynamics in a population, has not been usually included in such studies. The proposal of this study was to project the housing demand according to categories of housing deficit in the Metropolitan Area of Belo Horizonte, based on the estimates of housing needs in the past. The innovative feature is that models of Age-Period-Cohort were used to estimate the headship rate. Among other findings, it should be noted that a reasonable number of degraded dwellings will still exist in the short run despite the continuous decrease in the total housing deficit.One of the main objectives of public health care is to enable access to health assistance, which is regarded as a means to improve life conditions, and help social and economic development. Therefore, it is essential to understand any related factors and the patterns of health service utilization to enable the discussion of policies concerning equity of the health care. The main objective in this study was to develop a methodology to categorize the cities, by means of techniques based on the fuzzy sets. The results could be easily interpreted and the method was able to distinguish great inequities in the distribution of health care resources in the State of Minas Gerais.