Novas medidas de alfabetização e suas implicações: evidências para o Brasil

• Autor(a) principal: Ribeiro, Felipe Garcia
• Data de Publicação: 2009
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional do FGV (FGV Repositório Digital)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10438/2791
• topic: Externalidades; Analfabetos isolados; Analfabetos não-isolados; Medidas de alfabetização; Economia; Analfabetos - Brasil; Alfabetização - Brasil; Educação - Brasil - Indicadores; Educação - Modelos econométricos; Políticas públicas - Brasil

This work aims to investigate illiteracy in Brazil using new literacy measures initially developed by Basu and Foster (1998). We evaluate the proximate and isolated literacy profile of the Brazilian population and also apply the new literacy measures. Isolated illiterate is defined as an individual who do not live with a literate individual at the household level. We also look for evidence of household externalities from having literate children using parent productivity and job market participation levels. Due to the possibility of endogeneity of parents' interests with the children literacy profile using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) estimations, we use the availability of elementary schools and professors as instrumental variables to measure children literacy status. The results of Brazil's literacy profile show that regionally, Brazil's Northeast performed the poorest as it presents the biggest fraction of isolated illiterates in the whole country. This result impacts public policy relating to literacy in the region. The applications of new measures indicate the states' literacy rankings are sensitive to different literacy measures. The econometric results we find using OLS indicate a positive correlation between parents' dependent variable and children literacy profile. IV estimations do not confirm positive correlation found by OLS. Nevertheless, due to the sensitivity of the first stage estimation results, we cannot confirm that there are not externalities of a children's literacy for their parents.