UNEMPLOYMENT IN RIO DE JANEIRO’S LOW INCOME COMMUNITIES
Denise Britz do Nascimento Silva José Matias de Lima Doriam Luis Borges de Melo IBGE, Escola Nacional de Ciências Estatísticas Rua André Cavalcanti 106 Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brasil, 20231-050 E-mail: [email protected]
1. Introduction
Rio de Janeiro has major problems to solve regarding its housing and urban infrastructure sectors. As in the case of many large cities around the world, a significant portion of the inhabitants face housing conditions below minimum standards, as well as unemployment. Slums appear and grow along with the suburbs where they are located, as the poor population occupies vacant areas on hillsides and along waterfronts. The Rio de Janeiro City Council has launched a number of programs to benefit slum areas. These are not limited to urban infra-structure improvements, but also include job and income generation programs. In order to design effective policies, detailed statistical information about specific slum areas is essential. However, the national surveys regularly conducted by IBGE - the Brazilian Central Statistical Office - cannot be expected to provide information in such detail on a local level. Therefore, a series of sample surveys about housing conditions and the socio-economic profile of Rio de Janeiro’s low income communities (slums) has been carried out under the sponsorship of the Rio de Janeiro City Labour Department. This paper presents certain methodological aspects and a few results of these surveys, focusing the analysis on unemployment and its determinants.
2. The Survey
The main objective of the Low Income Community Survey - LICS - is to provide information regarding the economic activity going on in each community, together with a socio- economic profile of their population, supplying comprehensive information for each deprived area. The survey results include detailed information on schooling, employment status and the standard of living in the low income communities. The LICS is a household sample survey which aims at providing estimates for a number of socio-demographic variables for each one of 36 pre-defined slum areas. The survey target population comprises dwellers aged 10 years or older. As estimates are required for each of the 36 areas separately, independent samples were selected from each of the areas. However, the same survey design was adopted for all areas: a single-stage cluster sampling of households. The survey has two different units of analysis, the household and the individual dweller. Regarding the latter, the survey investigates general socio-demographic characteristics such as age, sex, place of birth, educational background, employment status, occupation, monthly income and others. The LICS has already covered 32 communities, in which 11,852 households were surveyed. The estimated total population in these areas is 147,504 people. Detailed information regarding the sampling design, field work and estimation procedures is available in Silva, Lima and Quintslr (1998).
2. Results
Based on survey results, one can analyse unemployment determinants in these deprived areas, as well as compare local results with those for the city as a whole. Several studies about unemployment have shown its relationship to poverty. Some argue that in Brazil unemployment does not affect different population subgroups in the same way, and that its prevalence is higher in low income groups. Others, however, state that people who are less educated have a lower chance of being unemployed, since they may be willing to accept poor quality jobs. Figure 1 presents unemployment rate estimates obtained from the Brazilian Labour Force Survey (BLFS) for the Rio de Janeiro metropolitan area, together with estimates for the slums covered by the LICS.
20,0%
18,0%
16,0%
14,0%
12,0%
10,0% LICS 8,0% Cumulative 6,0% Average 4,0% BLFS
2,0% 0,0% 11/97 01/98 02/98 04/98 06/98 07/98 09/98 11/98 12/98 02/99
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Although the unemployment trend is quite similar for both surveys, unemployment rates for the low income communities are in average roughly three times the rates for the city as a whole, indicating that unemployment may possibly be concentrated in certain population groups. To investigate this issue, statistical modelling is being carried out to analyse unemployment determinants in deprived areas. Logistic regression models, having unemployment indicators as response, and sex, age, education, place of birth and others as explanatory variables are fitted, taking into account both the survey design and the sampling weights. In addition, for the sake of comparison, the same logistic regression models have also been fitted ignoring the sample design. The results of both modelling procedures are presented and compared in the full paper.
REFERENCES
Silva, D.B.N, Lima, J.M. and Quintslr, P.L.S. (1998). A socio-economic survey for job and income development in Rio de Janeiro Slums. In Proceedings of the Joint IASS/IAOS Conference - Statistics for Economic and Social Development. INEGI. Aguascalientes, Mexico.
RESUME
Le Secrétairerie du Travail de la Mairie de la Ville de Rio de Janeiro développe des recherches por étudier les conditions d’habitation et le profil socio-économique des communautés pauvres de la Ville (favelas). Ce travail présente quelques aspects méthodologiques des principaux résultats de ces recherches envisageant l’analyse du chômage et ces déterminantes.