A multilevel analysis of school enrolment and education attainment in Brazil: demographic dividend versus municipal school factors

Juliana Riani, Centro de Desenvolvimento e Planejamento Regional (CEDEPLAR)

This paper combines two traditions in the field of education in order to analyze the determinants of school attendance and education attainment in Brazil. The innovation of this paper is to match microdata from the Demographic Census with municipal level aggregate data from the same census, and municipal level school data from the 2000 School Census. This matching allows the estimation of a hierarchical model for the determination of school enrolment and grade progression in Brazil. Our conclusion is that the demographic dividend had a stronger impact on school enrolment and a smaller effect on grade progression. On the other hand, the impact of school variables at the municipality level is stronger for grade progression than for school enrolment. This impact is stronger in the case of grade progression in fifth as compared to first grade. Finally, the impact of family level socioeconomic variables is strong in all models.