Joao Pedro Azevedo

Is the baby to blame ? an inquiry into the consequences of early childbearing

Teenage pregnancy has been a cause of concern for policy makers because it is associated with a complex and often adverse social context for women. It is seen as the cause of lower social and economic achievement for mothers and their children, and as the potential determinant of inter-generational poverty traps. However, the question of whether pregnancy -- and the subsequent rearing of a child -- is actually the trigger of poverty, higher dependence on social welfare and/ or other undesirable social and economic consequences has not been studied in developing countries with enough rigor to establish a causal relation. This paper follows a methodology previously applied in the United States, using Mexican data from the National Survey of Demographic Dynamics, to exploit information about miscarriages as an instrument to identify the long-term consequences of early child bearing. Thus, the paper takes the advantage of a natural experiment: it compares the outcomes of women who became pregnant in adolescence, and gave birth, to outcomes of women who became pregnant in adolescence and miscarried. This approach only allows for estimating the costs of adolescent childbearing for teenagers in a risk group, that is, teenagers who are likely to experience a pregnancy. The results are consistent with findings in the United States, suggesting that, contrary to popular thinking, adolescent childbearing does not hamper significantly the lifelong opportunities of the young mothers. Actually, women who gave birth during their adolescence have on average 0.34 more years of education, and are 21 percentage points more likely to be employed, compared with their counterparts who miscarried. The results also suggest, however, greater dependence on social welfare among women who gave birth during adolescence: their social assistance income is 36 percent higher, and they are more likely to participate in social programs, especially the conditional cash transfer program Oportunidades.

Inequality, Mobility and Middle Classes in Latin America

What is the link between middle class and income inequality? This chapter will assess the relationship between changes in income distribution and the growth of the middle class. Interest in the latter has peaked worldwide, as the rise of the global middle class is increasingly recognized as a key megatrend (Global Trends 2030, 2013). Zooming in on the concrete case of Latin America and the Caribbean, we know that, as economic activity has grown and poverty levels have fallen alongside economic growth, the middle class is on the rise. We also know that income inequality has fallen in the region. Within this context, following a discussion on the middle class and inequality and presenting some recent trends, this chapter asks how much of the expansion of the middle class in Latin America is explained by economic growth, and how much by the decline in income inequality.1

What is the Value of Educational Broadcast

Over the years several developed and developing countries have used television broadcasting as a tools to enhance the dissemination of specific educational programs, as well as information and values to a large segment of their population. This paper sets out to measure the social value of one of this initiatives in the context of a developing country, namely the Futura TV channel in Brazil. The Futura is a communication project, ran by a non-profit foundation financed exclusively by private sector donations in Brazil. With almost 10 years of existence, Futura broadcast reaches almost 50% of the Brazilian population, and has approximately 33 million regular viewers in the whole country. Contingency valuation (CV) techniques using the referendum design were used to estimate the willingness to pay of a representative sample of the Brazilian adult population. Using both parametric and non-parametric techniques this paper is able to estimate the population willingness to pay for Futura, even in a sample in which a 60% of the population choose not to consume the good. The analysis suggest that the willingness to pay for the channel is positive and at least 16 times greater than the channel operation cost. The average minimum willingness to pay estimated using the Turnbull nonparametric model was R

GRQREG: Stata module to graph the coefficients of a quantile regression

3.7 per month, while the parametric average willingness to pay estimated with the Spike model suggested a value of R

WBOPENDATA: Stata module to access World Bank databases

5.9. When multiplied by the 5 million households with at least one member willing to pay something for the Futura TV channel, the total annual social value of the channel ranges from 330 to 550 million reais. Moreover, the complementary social mobilization activities promoted by the Futura channel seems to have a positive impact on its social value, suggesting that the method was successful in terms of disentangling embedded effects.