Estudo de caso sobre a Estratégia Nacional de Educação Financeira (ENEF) no Brasil: uma panaceia em um contexto de financeirização?

Abstract

This paper is a case study on the actions and initiatives that make up the National Strategy for Financial Education (NSFE) in the country. Established in 2010 from a joint construction of a network of developed or developing countries, the Brazilian ENEF proposes to boost the level of financial literacy of ordinary citizens - especially low-income people - in order to promote a more efficient assertive behavior, which contributes to greater financial well-being. However, despite the great effort involving several institutions and hundreds of initiatives, the paper shows that there is no evidence that NSFE can achieve the proposed goals. The paper analyzes a series of surveys evaluating the impacts of financial education pilot projects, pointing to the fragility of the results, especially as they incur in self-declared response biases that do not correctly measure the impacts. Without robust results, one can say that the nature of NSFE is predominantly optimistic in relation to market institutions, which prevents it from presenting a more critical treatment to its target audience.