O impacto do Fundef na alocação de recursos para a educação básica

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to study the impact of the Fundo de Manutenção e Desenvolvimento do Ensino Fundamental (Fundef) fund on the allocation of public resources among elementary and secondary school levels, and to evaluate the extent to which the fund’s criterion for allocation of its resources introduced distortions in their distribution. To measure it, we use as benchmark the allocation that would be produced if those funds were distributed in the same manner that families spend income for private schooling. To do that we propose a model for those expenditures that uses as explanatory variables the head’s education, the state of residence of the family, and some other demographic variables. We estimate the corresponding equation for data from the 1996´s Family Expenditure Survey (POF), and use it to simulate the allocation that would result from the private distribution of the Fundef funds. The results show that Fundef significantly reduced the difference between the public and the private allocations for the majority of the states in the North and Northeast regions, while the opposite occurs for the South and Southeast regions. When we take into consideration the distribution of the fund’s resources throughout the states, the second effect dominates the first, and we conclude that Fundef increases that deviation at the national level.