O Programa Bolsa-Família e o trabalho infantil no Brasil / Bolsa Família Program and the child labor in Brazil

AUTOR(ES)
FONTE

IBICT - Instituto Brasileiro de Informação em Ciência e Tecnologia

DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

13/08/2010

RESUMO

Child labor is an activity presented in the lives of approximately 218 million children worldwide leading to a serious problem. There were around 4.8 million children and adolescents from 5 to 17 years old in Brazil with some working activity in 2007. The federal government has, over the years, adopting policies to combat poverty and its consequences in an attempt to eliminate, or at least to ease the problem of child labor in Brazil. Bolsa-Familia Program (BFP) a conditionally cash transfer program created in 2004 was one of these policies. According to this Program, the families who receive benefits from it must keep children at school and away from working activities. However, a question arises: has the Program really contributed to the decrease of child labor in Brazil? A hypothesis is that it has, no matter the gender of the child and/or the region where he/she lives. In order to test this hypothesis, a cross section study was developed by analyzing data from the National Household Sample Survey PNAD, for the year 2006, based on the propensity score matching method. It consisted of finding a group of non-participants of the Program, but with observable similar or very close characteristics, and comparing this group to the treatment group. The comparison made, the average treatment effect on the treated was calculated by nonparametric matching algorithms. The results achieved indicate that when considering child labor in Brazil, BFP contributed to its reduction in general, to the female in relation to the male child, and also to those who declared themselves as black child. The same analysis was done to the Northeast and the results were quite similar. However, BFP did not achieve the same effectiveness when the household child labor was taken into consideration. Based on these results, we can conclude that the Program was a good way to reduce and eliminate child labor in Brazil even thought we must highlight the existence of different social problems, not only poverty, and also the gender and regions differences which must be considered when facing child labor.

ASSUNTO(S)

economia dos programas de bem-estar social trabalho infantil trabalho infantil doméstico políticas públicas programa bolsa-família child labor child domestic labor public policy bolsa-família program

ACESSO AO ARTIGO

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