Ensaios sobre o ensino fundamental no Brasil

Abstract

This thesis aims to estimate the efficiency of public expenditures, analyze potential climatic effects on the dispersion of such efficiency or as a determinant of municipal elementary school performance between 2011 and 2021, and, finally, propose a general equilibrium model to define the best educational financing and efficiency strategy that municipal public management should adopt to improve the quality of life of its inhabitants. In the first chapter, the objective is to investigate whether inefficiencies exist in municipal public elementary education in Brazil. Using balanced panel data from 3,159 Brazilian municipalities for the years 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2019, and 2021, the study estimates the technical inefficiency in education for fifth-grade students in elementary school through the estimation of a stochastic frontier model based on the simulated marginal maximum likelihood estimator proposed by Belotti and Ilardi (2017). The results show that: municipal public elementary education is inefficient; in each state, capital cities tend to be the most efficient municipalities; and municipalities that efficiently transform educational inputs into math performance also efficiently achieve the best possible results in Portuguese for a given level of educational inputs. In the second chapter, the objective is to verify whether climatic variations can be considered an important factor in fifth-grade elementary school performance in Brazil. To reduce the effects of heterogeneity across municipalities, a clustering methodology based on the climatic characteristics of Brazil's five regions is applied. For each region, municipalities are grouped using the k-means clustering technique. Subsequently, fixed-effects panel data models with robust standard errors are estimated for each cluster in Brazil's regions. The main findings provide evidence that climatic variations significantly affect fifth-grade elementary school performance. These impacts are positive for some groups and negative for others, even among municipalities in geographically close but distinct clusters. This evidence suggests that some municipalities are better adapted to handle climatic variations than others. Finally, the third chapter aims to analyze the impact of Law 14,023/07 from the perspective of municipal public agents seeking to maximize the well-being of their local populations. In other words, it seeks to define the best educational financing and efficiency strategy that municipal public management should adopt to improve the quality of life of its inhabitants. To achieve this goal, a dynamic general equilibrium model with two regions is used to analyze how changes in ICMS (a value-added tax) distribution rules from 2007 affected the educational system in the state of Ceará. The model is calibrated so that the regions represent the municipality of Sobral and the set of all other municipalities in Ceará. The results indicate the existence of a single Nash equilibrium, defined by the dominant strategies for both administrations, in which both increase expenditures and efficiency in municipal education. Significant welfare gains are observed for the populations of both regions, with greater intensity in the region composed of all municipalities except Sobral. Positive effects are also observed in terms of production, consumption, tax revenue, and the amount of transfers received by municipalities. These results are directly associated with increases in human capital in both regions, driven by improved responses from municipal administrations to the game established by the State Government.