New measures of education and educational inequality for the first half of the 20th Century in Brazil

Abstract

This paper describes the trajectory of educational level and inequality in Brazil in the first half of the 20th century. We combine various sources of historical data, such as the reports of the Ministry of Business of the Empire, the Statistical Yearbooks of Brazil and the Demographic Censuses to construct new educational measures and calculate educational Gini indices between 1900 and 2000 for each region and for Brazil as a whole. Our results show that between 1900 and 1930 the proportion of people with complete primary education in the population remained around 5%, while the share of secondary education was always below 1% and that only 0.3% had higher education complete. Thus, educational inequality remained constant until 1920, declining slowly between 1920 and 1950 and more rapidly thereafter.