Pedro Cavalcanti Ferreira (Fundação Getulio Vargas)

Pedro Cavalcanti Ferreira
Fundação Getulio Vargas

Coauteurs : Tiago Cavalcanti, Filipe Fiedler, Luciene Pereira et Cezar Santos.

Résumé

We estimate the impact of democratization and voting restrictions on educational outcomes in a developing country using an overlapping generations model, which incorporates a standard quantity-quality trade-off between fertility and children's education.
Government subsidies for different educational levels are determined through elections, which may bias policy toward early or college education.
The model, calibrated using Brazilian data from 1900 to 2000, simulates various scenarios of democratization.
The findings suggest that universal suffrage since 1900 would have boosted primary education, eliminated illiteracy by 1980, and reduced extreme poverty to 0.6% by 1960.
However, it would have lowered college enrollment, reduced per capita income, and significantly diminished the well-being of the wealthy.
In contrast, under elite control and the continuation of early 20th-century electoral restrictions, poverty rates would have likely doubled, as relative spending on primary education would have decreased significantly.