Applying minimum income programs in Brazil two case studies: Belém and Belo Horizonte (original) (raw)
Related papers
Applying Minimum Income Programmes in Brazil: Two Case Studies
ILO, SES Papers , 2001
This paper examines the recent experiences of Belem and Belo Horizonte, two Brazilian metropolitan nuclei where minimum income programs have been implemented. The idea is to verify to which extent the financial conditions in each of these municipalities seem to be compatible with the implementation of the program benefiting a significant share of the total number of the local poor. Alternatives will be considered for defining the target population in terms of income and family characteristics, as well as for establishing the value of the monthly transfer. The paper initially focuses on Brasilia’s experience as the basis for adopting the same policy in Belem and Belo Horizonte. Next it describes the characteristics of program design and operation in Belem and Belo Horizonte. Despite the fact that the two municipalities present quite different characteristics, which, in their turn, are quite diverse from Brasilia’s, both programs essentially adopted most operational parameters from the Federal District’s program. Data from the National Household Survey are used to evidence the operational limits which the program faces in these two municipalities, given the size of the target population and the financial restrictions. Specific recommendations are presented to improve program’s efficiency in each case.
From the Minimum Income Concept to the Brazilian Bolsa-Familia
Poverty in Brazil. Concepts, Measures, Policies i, 2021
In view of how programs emulating the Federal District Bolsa-Escola were being created in a large number of municipalities across the country without considering the operational and financial challenges ahead, this paper certainly had a pedagogical approach. It argues that a previous analysis is required in each case and illustrates empirically this step-by-step procedure based on both the characteristics of poverty and on the financial conditions in each political unit. The results show that, even in the metropolitan nuclei, such a program is too costly in most cases, especially considering the wellknown deficiencies of basic social services. As a matter of fact, most of these local programs legally created in the midnineties had not even been implemented when the practical difficulties became clear. However, given the attractiveness of the targeted cash-transfer as a public policy, the Federal government created its own Bolsa-Escola in 1997. It became the first of a series of cash transfer programs that were redesigned and consolidated to became today’s Bolsa-Familia. This text was extracted from an unpublished report prepared for the World Bank in 1999.
2008
A persistent and very high-income inequality is well known feature of the Brazilian economy. However, from 2001 to 2005 the Gini index presented an unprecedented fall of -4.6% combined with a significant poverty reduction. Former studies using partial equilibrium analysis have pointed out the importance of federal government transfer programs for this inequality reduction. The aiming of this research was to evaluate the efficiency of the two most important cash transfer programs, "Bolsa Familia" and "BPC", in achieving their purposes of alleviating poverty and reducing the inequality in Brazil's income distribution using an integrated modeling approach, CGE-MS model. The simulation results confirm the importance of these programs to reduce inequality during 2003-2005. But, the effect on poverty alleviation was not strong. Finally, the methodological approach allows the identification of some important economic facts that were not presented in previous analysi...
New policies against poverty: conditional cash transfer programs in São Paulo, Brazil
This work aims at examining changes in State performance against poverty and inequality in Brazil through the study of recent experiments in social policy, i.e. the conditional cash transfer programs, focusing on those ones that have been developed in São Paulo. From survey data carried out by the Center for Metropolitan Studies (CEM-CEBRAP) in the city of São Paulo in 2008, this paper analyzes the main determinants of poor people's access to conditional cash transfer programs. In that sense, this work intends to contribute to the understanding of the role of State in the mitigation or in the reproduction of poverty and inequality.
Poverty in Brazil: Concepts, Measures and Policies Edited by Eliva Press
2021
Focused on poverty in Brazil since 1990, this book is a collection of fifteen articles that goes all the way from concepts to policies, covering different aspects of analysis in the long term. Conceptually, it adopts the income approach, since income is a good proxy of wellbeing in an urbanized medium-income country such as Brazil. Although the income-poverty was globally dominant, especially in country-wide studies, the establishment and use of locally-specific poverty lines in Brazil were exceptional, when most countries used ad hoc values, and this for the simple reason that without the needed data available they could not do otherwise. Official Annual Households Surveys provided the micro-data to update the series of indicators and produce analyses reflecting macroeconomic changes, as well as those regarding social concerns and policies in the twenty-five-year period. Besides focusing on poverty lines and income poverty measures and analyses, many of the texts illustrate how microdata from the household survey were the basis for designing anti-poverty mechanisms. For example, when the pioneer cash-transfer Bolsa-Escola program was implemented in Brasilia, household microdata was then used to make different estimates of the target population, as well as to redefine operational parameters so as to guarantee a better fit to local conditions (text 11). This opened a new path for planning social policies, that is, using household microdata to analyze different options and estimating the corresponding impacts before making the final choice. The fifteen texts can be roughly classified in four groups. A first group is formed by three texts centered on conceptual and methodological questions, such as the description of procedures for establishing poverty lines using data on consumption patterns from the regionalized national survey (text 6). The texts in the second group evolve around poverty indicators and analyses, especially the impacts of economic events on poverty, such as the sharp reduction of poverty rates after the 1994 monetary stabilization (Text 8) or the stagnation of rates during the period of sluggish growth in the late nineties and early two-thousands (Text 9). A third group is formed by texts related to program and policy evaluation, such as the one on child labor and the impacts of the program for eradication of child labor (text 10) and the text discussing the link between poverty and sustainability (Text 5). The last two texts are centered on the relationship between poverty and inequality, but from two quite different points of view: the first, addresses the causal relationship between low educational level and low qualification of the labor force; the second, is centered on poverty and on how unequal its distribution is when certain characteristics are considered, such as age.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
A persistent and very high-income inequality is well known feature of the Brazilian economy. However, from 2001 to 2005 the Gini index presented an unprecedented fall of -4.6% combined with a significant poverty reduction. Former studies using partial equilibrium analysis have pointed out the importance of federal government transfer programs for this inequality reduction. The aiming of this research was to evaluate the efficiency of the two most important cash transfer programs, "Bolsa Família" and "BPC", in achieving their purposes of alleviating poverty and reducing the inequality in Brazil's income distribution using an integrated modeling approach, CGE-MS model. The simulation results confirm the importance of these programs to reduce inequality during 2003-2005. But, the effect on poverty alleviation was not strong. Finally, the methodological approach allows the identification of some important economic facts that were not presented in previous analysis, such as the issue of taxation structure that finances these policies.
2015
The Bolsa Familia (BF) is considered to be a well-targeted cash transfer programme for poor families, with benefits conditional on meeting health and educational requirements. Extreme poverty in Brazil is concentrated in rural areas, and is highest among those who rely on agriculture in historically underprivileged areas of the semiarid interior. Although there is no comprehensive study of chronic poverty in Brazil due to lack of longitudinal datasets, one can infer that, the more remote small, poor rural municipalities are, the higher is the probability of persistent and severe poverty. Therefore, it is questionable whether the BF, with conditionalities attached to frequently limited services, is the most appropriate social protection policy for reaching the working-age able-bodied rural poor living in isolated areas. I identified the rural poor in remote and non-remote municipalities using geographical information systems. In this thesis, through four pieces of analytical work, I ...