Pobreza multidimensional: a educação como fator de superação da pobreza no semiárido brasileiro

Abstract

The study of the potential of education in overcoming poverty in the Brazilian semiarid region was inspired by the need to contribute to overcoming this problem, which is the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG). The objective of this research is to study the role of education as poverty overcoming factor in the Brazilian semiarid region, through multivariate data analysis techniques, such as the factor analysis and cluster analysis for measurement and analysis of poverty, if calculating the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) and educational status; besides the use of descriptive measures such as mean, median, maximum, minimum,standard deviation and coefficient of variation in order to obtain a preliminary analysis of the relationship between poverty and education in the Brazilian semiarid region, which will be statistically confirmed by “F” statistic of analysis variance (ANOVA) test and quantile regression. Secondary data were used at the municipal level, which were based on the year 2010, having been taken from the Agricultural Census (2006); Search Basic Profile of Brazilian Municipalities (2011); the Demographic Census (2010, published by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), the Atlas of Human Development 2013 published by the United Nations Development Programmer (PNUD), the National Institute of Educational Studies Teixeira (INEP .) and the Institute of Applied Economic Research (IPEA). The results showed that according to the MPI, the Brazilian semiarid region has 351 municipalities classified as poor (0.652 ≤ IPM ≤ 1); 599 at an intermediate level of poverty (0.446 ≤ IPM ≤ 0.651) and 183 municipalities classified as less poor (0 ≤ IPM ≤ 0.444).The worst educational indicators were found in the group of 351 poorest municipalities. In addition only 61.3% of the semiarid municipalities have municipal education plan, 84.1% of these have city council education and 56.8% have municipal fund education. The Municipal management Index of semiarid education, calculated by aggregating these three education management mechanisms is 0.527. A comparison of the results of the traditional regression method estimated by Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and quantile regression showed that reverse is the relationship between IDHM - Education and IPM in all quantiles of the distribution. It concluded that the main factor in poverty semiarid is the precarious conditions of employment and income. The greatest contribution of the research was to show that education is, in fact, a component of overcoming poverty, stressing the importance of municipal power and a different vision for the region, recognizing that there are priority areas in overcoming this problem and spaces that distinguished themselves from the others to achieve lower poverty standards.