New measures of literacy and their implications: evidences for Brazil

• Grant number: 08/02450-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: September 01, 2008
• End date: May 31, 2009
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Economics - Social Welfare Economics
• Principal Investigator: André Portela Fernandes de Souza
• Grantee: Felipe Garcia Ribeiro
• Host Institution: Escola de Economia de São Paulo (EESP). Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The aim of this study is to analyze literacy in Brazil by using new literacy measures, initially developed by Basu and Foster (1998). These measures are capable to capture the existent externalities which bring benefits to illiterate individuals who belong to families in which there is at least one literate member. On literature, we can find two efforts generated by this paper: the first is to verify if these externalities exist in fact and their actual broadness; the second is to expand the measure developed by Basu and Foster (1998) by bringing new elements together, as the number of literate people on family and their gender. On this context, this project aims to find the evidences for these externalities, such as the measure for them in Brazil. For so, at first there is a discussion about the evolution of literacy in the last decades under different literacy indicators. At last, using "instrumental variables" to avoid the possible problem of endogeneity between the parents income level and the children's' literacy, it evaluates empirically the existence of those externalities from the estimation of revenue impacts and illiterate parents health when at least one of their children is literate. We hope to capture the casual relation between literacy and the parents income level.