Expansão educacional e a saúde dos adultos no Brasil: uma análise para 1998 e 2019

Abstract

The educational expansion process, which has occurred in Brazil in recent decades, has changed the composition of the adult population by educational level. Given the association between education and health, widely discussed in the literature, it is expected that the expansion process is related to changes in health among educational groups and mobility and selectivity processes in educational transitions. This work aims to analyze the health differentials within and between educational groups in Brazil, in the context of educational expansion, in 1998 and 2019. For this, the Decomposition of the Sum of Squares is used for the categorical variable and two dimensions of health: state self-rated and prevalence of three diseases, heart, diabetes, and hypertension, based on data from the National Household Sample Survey (PNAD), applied in 1998 and the National Health Survey (PNS), applied in 2019. The work also performs a standardization to isolate the effect of changes in age and education distribution in the analyzed period. The results point to a consistent reduction in the variability in the health outcomes of the less educated group and a more subtle increase in the variability of the more educated groups between 1998 and 2019. In addition, the younger cohorts benefited more from educational expansion than the old ones and were the primary agents for increasing the variability of the higher educational level group. When analyzing the differences between the sexes, the female population increased its participation in higher educational levels, reducing the differences between the sexes and contributing more to the variability in the health of the more educated groups. When carrying out the standardization, it was found that the results using the health status variable are no longer observed. As for the prevalence of diseases, after standardization, the results found in the decomposition are more subtle. The work contributes by presenting the educational transition's role in understanding changes in health inequality by educational groups in Brazil.