A comprehensive diagnostic of Brazil’s large cities

With research centered along three thematic lines – economic activities and the labor market, the State and its policies, and the sociability of its citizens – the Center for Metropolitan Studies tracks the major problems and dynamic potential of Brazil’s metropolitan regions.

By José Tadeu Arantes

The quality of basic health and education in Brazil has improved significantly in the last two decades. This improvement is reflected in the Municipal Human Development Index (MHDI), which increased from 0.493 in 1991 to 0.727 in 2010, reaching a level that is considered high according to the assessment of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in a study released in July 2013. The increase in the MHDI would have been larger had it not been for the indices of the quality of education, which, despite rising, remained extremely low.

Indicators obtained by the Center for Metropolitan Studies (CEM) for 10 years of research reveal that although quality gains in health services have been more or less uniform for Brazilian municipalities as a whole, the disparities in education have worsened. “The inequality in basic health is less than the inequality in basic education,” says Marta Arretche, coordinator of the CEM, one of the Research, Innovation, and Dissemination Centers (RIDCs) funded by FAPESP.

The study, which used 10 indicators to assess the performance of basic health and education in every Brazilian municipality throughout the 2000s, found that municipalities with large poor populations have more difficulty improving student performance. “While the performance of basic health is weakly associated with the percentage of poor in the municipality, the performance of the municipalities’ basic education systems has a strong negative association with the poverty rate,” Arretche states.

The research, which compared the track record and performance of each Brazilian municipality, left some questions unanswered. What factors affect these results? What action plans can be drawn from these conclusions? Why are municipalities that have large numbers of poor people unable to improve education? The search for an answer to these questions is on the Center’s agenda in the coming years.

There are already strong signs that the universalization model influences the performance of each of the systems. Whereas the basic health system has centralized management in the form of the National Healthcare System (SUS), the basic education system is run by each individual municipality. “No one can deny that the SUS has a very positive influence on the sector’s improved performance,” says Arretche. “And, given that the universalization of elementary through high school was achieved through municipal management, the relationship between the presence of the poor and academic performance affects the public schools more strongly.”

Research into the performance of the education and health systems is part of the research portfolio of this RIDC, which was established in 2000 during the first round of the Program to examine the processes involved in reproducing inequalities in cities and to provide data and assistance for formulating public policies.

Personal networks

Another research study, conducted by Nadya Guimarães, full professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of São Paulo and director of the National Institute of Science and Technology for Metropolitan Studies, based in the CEM, set out to understand the intensive macro-economic and micro-organizational restructuring that occurred in Brazil beginning in the 1990s. “First, we analyzed what was happening to the trajectories of individuals in the labor market when productive activity contracted and unemployment grew, like it did here during the first half of the 2000s,” says Guimarães.

“In partnership with the SEADE (State System of Data Analysis), we used questionnaires to conduct a household sample survey that included 55,000 people in the metropolitan area of São Paulo, whose occupational trajectories were traced from the time of the Plano Real (1994) to the time of the survey (2001).”

A sub-sample of cases was then analyzed more thoroughly and was monitored between 2002 and 2005 through two rounds of qualitative interviews to explore how these individuals interpreted their experiences seeking opportunities in the job market.

To better understand the particularities of São Paulo, the researchers conducted a similar study in partnership with Japanese and French colleagues in the metropolitan areas of Tokyo and Paris. These cities were similarly subject to important changes in the conditions governing access to jobs and the growing risk of unemployment, but they differed from the Brazilian case because of the hardiness of their political protection systems – public in the case of France and private in the case of Japan.

“We noted that in São Paulo, the trajectories were marked by extreme transitions between jobs, unemployment, and inactivity, giving rise to erratic occupational paths, motivated by an overarching concern with achieving immediate survival at all costs,” notes Guimarães.

“This reflected the limited nature of the policies that protected the unemployed in terms of their capacity to include potential applicants or with regard to the benefits granted by recently implemented institutions, in the Brazilian case, such as unemployment insurance or the public system of support for job retraining, intermediation, and placement,” she adds.

The study found that personal networks of sociability were the mechanisms by which individuals sought and found jobs and immediate support to cope with unemployment or inactivity.

“In the metropolitan area of São Paulo, where 8 out of every 10 people interviewed said they were seeking work through family members, friends, and acquaintances and 7 out of every 10 said they had found their most recent job by relying on their personal networks, these informal mechanisms were the most effective way to overcome unemployment. However, our data have also shown that the employment opportunities created within these social circuits were of lower quality and lasted for less time,” the researcher says.

The power of personal networks in obtaining access to jobs is a feature that is not limited to the city of São Paulo. Comparative studies provide evidence that this characteristic has appeared in other Brazilian cities, although at varied intensities, and that it is more conspicuous where the markets are more precarious and informal. It has been more effective in the Northeast (particularly in Recife and Salvador) than in the Southeast and the South (particularly in Porto Alegre).

Labor intermediation becomes an emerging activity

Researchers analyzed the reconfiguration of employment relations in Brazil when occupational opportunities were expanded in the wake of continuous economic growth during the second half of the 2000s.

“By analyzing statistics from the Ministry of Labor and Employment (RAIS-Migra), we noted that when formal employment expanded in Brazil, there was a much more rapid increase in a particular type of formally registered job: that offered by what we refer to as ‘job opportunity intermediaries’ such as employment agencies or temporary employment services,” reports Guimarães.

“It was an interesting finding,” she adds. “In a market characterized by the strength of personal networks of sociability, the commercial mechanisms that connected individuals who were looking for work with available jobs grew very quickly.”

To obtain a better understanding of these job intermediaries and the individuals who used them, a new sample survey that included nearly 1,600 cases was conducted among workers in search of employment at agencies in the metropolitan region of São Paulo in 2004.

That survey found a younger, increasingly female, more educated workforce that was mainly in search of a first job.

“By analyzing their trajectories in the market, we saw that most of them found their first formally registered job through the intermediaries. But although they had a high probability of remaining employed in the formal market, their connections were of short duration (in other words, they were subject to high job turnover), and wage gains were much smaller than those received in the form of minimum wage post-2005.”

Furthermore, the researchers found that companies devoted to job intermediation had become a powerful segment of economic activity and were fundamentally integrated with those who hired their services, which were some of the most modern companies of São Paulo, as verified by the São Paulo Economic Activity Survey.

“More importantly,” underscores Guimarães, “Brazil was one of the leading countries in the international scenario of job intermediation in this field of activity. In exploring comparative international statistics for the years 2008-2010, we saw that Brazil stood out alongside countries recognized in the world for intermediate and temporary labor, such as Japan, England, Spain, the Netherlands, and the United States, by the number of employment agencies and intermediate workers as well as by its share of earnings generated by the industry on an international scale. In other words, in the same wave of economic growth that saw the expansion of employment, labor relations seemed to progressively reconfigure themselves, becoming increasingly more diversified along with economic momentum.”

To learn more: Education, inequalities, and quota policy, and A society with 12.4 million slum dwellers.