Desigualdade salarial e distribuição de educação: a evolução das diferenças regionais no Brasil

Abstract

This paper has three objectives: a) to describe the temporal and regional patterns of wage inequality in metropolitan Brazil, identifying whether these patterns ate associated with those observed in the distribution of education and in the steepness of the wage-education profiles; b) to estimate the impact of the standardization of the distribution of education on these differences; and c) to discuss the causal interpretation of the results obtained. It is shown that education can explain almost 50% of the wage inequality in metropolitan Brazil We also observe that: a) wage inequality has been stable in metropolitan Brazil along the 1976186 period, b) there exist sharp differences in wage inequality across metropolitan areas, greater than the observed temporal variations; and c) the level of inequality is much smaller in the Southeast regions than in the metropolitan regions of the North and Northeast. We conclude that education explains better regional differences than temporal variations in inequality. Besides that, the simulation results indicate that wage inequality in the Northeast metropolitan regions is higher that, in the SouthSoutheast not because these regions have higher or better distributed levels of education, but because - perhaps as a consequence of a better distribution of education - the wage-education profile is less steep in these regions than in the Northeast regions.