Determinants of the Educational Performance in Brazil

Abstract

Despite the high estimated returns to schooling, the Brazilian educational indicators have been below international standards over the years. Worse, the poorer the family the lower human capital investment is. Since the individual probability of being poor is strongly determined by the educational level, there exists a process of intergenerational transmission of poverty. The main goal of this article is to investigate the determinants of the weak educational performance in Brazil. The analysis focus on 11-to-25-year-old individuals, living in urban areas of the Northeast and Southeast regions. Four individual educational level determinants are investigated: the availability and quality of the educational services, the attractiveness of the labor market, the availability of family resources (financial and non-financial), and the amount of resources in the community where the individual lives. Similar to previous works, family attributes appear to be the most important. Furthermore, the results suggest that attractive labor markets are related to lower levels of schooling.