Opportunity Foregone: Education in Brazil.

Abstract

This volume is a result of the ‘Education, Economic Growth, and Inequality in Brazil’ symposium held in Rio de Janeiro from March 24-27, 1991. This book proposes methods to improve the achievement level of Brazilian school children and increase the efficiency of the educational system. The authors analyse the barriers to educational reform in Brazil and document the relatively poor quality of basic education and discuss how it has constrained productivity and wages. It argues that sustaining the country’s macroeconomic reforms will demand a more skilled, better-educated work force. If offers an assessment of why educational performance in Brazil has lagged behind other countries, and examines the barriers to educational reform. There are eighteen case studies within this publication, divided into four sections. Section I ‘Background and setting’ contains: Chapter one: Education in Brazil: playing a bad hand badly / Nancy Birdsall, Barbara Bruns and Richard H. Sabot; Chapter two: Where does Brazil fit?: schooling investments in an international perspective / Jere R. Behrman and Ryan Schneider; Chapter three: Education and economic growth: some cross-sectional evidence / Lawrence J. Lau, Dean T. Jamison, Shucheng Liu and Steven Rivkin; Chapter four: Why Brazil lags behind in educational development / David N. Plank, Jose Amaral Sobrinho and Antonio Carlos da Ressurreicao Xavier. Section II ‘Education and earnings’ contains: Chapter five: Wages, schooling and background: investments in men and women in urban Brazil / John Strauss and Duncan Thomas; Chapter six: Temporal evolution of the relationship between wages and education of Brazilian men / Ricardo Barros and Lauro Ramos; Chapter seven: Do returns to schooling vary across industries? / Donald Robbins and Mari Minowa; The quality of schooling and labor market outcomes / Jere R. Behrman, Nancy Birdsall and Robert Kaplan. Section III ‘Education and inequality’ contains: Chapter nine: Educational expansion and the inequality of pay in Brazil and Korea / Young-Bum Park, David R. Ross and Richard H. Sabot; Chapter ten: Social mobility: the role of education in determining status / Jose Pastore and Helio Zylberstajn; Chapter eleven: Education, mobility and growth / Irma Adelman, Samuel Morley, Christoph Schenzler and Stephen Vogel; Chapter twelve: Income and educational inequality and children’s schooling attainment / Ricardo Barros and David Lam; Chapter thirteen: Family background, quality of education and public and private schools: effects on school transitions / Alberto de Mello e Souza and Nelson do Valle Siva. Section IV ‘Educational policy issues’ contains: Chapter fourteen: Efficiency-enhancing investments in school quality / Eric A. Hanushek, Joao Batista Gomes-Neto and Ralph W. Harbison; Chapter fifteen: The causes and effects of grade repetition / Joao Batista Gomes-Neto and Eric A. Hanushek; Chapter sixteen: Private education and public regulation / Estelle James, Carlos Alberto Primo Braga and Paulo de Tarso Afonso de Andre; Chapter seventeen: Dealing with poor students / Claudio de Moura Castro, Sonia Dantas Pinto Guimaraes, Joao Batista Araujo e Oliveira and Sergio Costa Ribeiro; Chapter eighteen: The economics of higher education / Jean-Jacques Paul and Laurence Wolff.

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