Abstracts Economics

Evaluation of brazilian education policies of the late 2000s

by Bruno Toshio Ogava

After accomplishing the goal to universalize the access to basic education in the early 2000s, the Brazilian government shifted the focus of its education policies to improve education quality. Actions were taken in the late 2000s following a couple of strategies aimed at this new goal. In particular, a teachers’ exclusive wage floor was implemented, as a way of valuing the teaching profession, and there was an expansion in early childhood education systems, as a way of getting children to start schooling earlier. In this piece we seek to understand the fundamentals behind these policies and the institutional backgrounds which led to its implementations, as well as to evaluate them using modern econometric techniques. In both cases we rely on data from scores on national and standardized tests, as well as other data sources to fulfill the particular needs of each evaluation.