Study Reveals Race and Gender Inequalities Impact Distribution of Health and Education Spending
Economic Policy Note (NPE) 49, Race and gender inequality and distributional impacts of public spending on health and education in Brazil, identifies that these expenses help reduce monetary income inequality in Brazil, regardless of race and gender. Researcher João Pedro de Freitas Gomes, from the Center for Research in Macroeconomics of Inequalities (Made) at the Faculty of Economics, Administration, Accounting and Actuarial Science (FEA) at USP, explains the preparation of the work and analyzes the results observed in the project.
According to the researcher, the aim of the work is to understand how much fiscal policy changes the income structure of a country and, to this end, the professionals made a summary of the population’s income through salaries, benefits and transfers and then added public spending. with health and education. In this way, he says that it is possible to analyze how much public spending impacts the structures of social inequality in the country, in addition to being able to devise strategies to direct the focus of investments in this sector.
Data
According to Gomes, the research was challenging because it involved obtaining data from several different locations, with the Family Budget Survey (POF) from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) being the main source sought. He states that this construction of each individual’s income is extremely detailed in the work and adequately separates the origin of each value that makes up their income, as well as the description of which sectors families spend their money most.
According to the researcher, after analyzing the possession of money, the observation becomes a little more complicated because it involves a series of hypotheses, which influence the way in which money is invested through public policies. He states that spending on public education is disclosed by the National Institute of Educational Studies and Research Anísio Teixeira (Inep) through spreadsheets that inform the amounts allocated to each municipality.
“Every year we use this spreadsheet to distribute Inep and education expenses for each family, according to the number of children who are of school age and in public school. Of course, this has a problem that assumes that, for example, all municipalities in the same State will have approximately the same educational graph, but of course we know that there is inequality between municipalities”, he says.
Health
For health expenditures, the group uses the IBGE National Health Survey (PNS) and, in this way, is able to detail the population’s expenditure on medicines, consultations and treatments. Gomes states that with these numbers it is possible to understand the size and importance of the country’s unique system.
“Once we have this distribution, we join the PNS data with the education data using a variable in common between the two bases, which is income from work. This way, we obtain a monetary income that is our base income, that is, a type of market income before any government intervention to analyze people’s spending on health and education”, he says.
Inequalities
According to João Pedro de Freitas Gomes, the researchers’ analysis showed that 25% of the total inequality presented in the observed expenses comes from
of racial inequality, which shows that 25% of this disparity would be resolved or equalized if white and black people were paid equally.
Thus, as Gomes states, the analysis showed that, among the poorest 10% in the country, spending on health and education represents 50% of total income. “Throughout the research, we observed that these disparities are emerging among the poorest, with women and have a very strong concentration in black, brown and indigenous people. Therefore, what is observed is the importance of investing in public policies in quality health and education for these parts of the population”, he concludes.