Impacto dos gastos com educação através do FUNDEB na qualidade da educação pública municipal

Abstract

Education, seen as an indispensable asset for the development of a country, holds an important part of Brazil's political investments, especially in the last decades. In 1998, the Fund for Maintenance and Development of Elementary Education and Valorization of Teaching - FUNDEF, was responsible for allocating a greater share of financial resources from the federal sphere to municipalities, as a way to reduce the inefficiency of allocation of them until then. In 2008, the fund has been reformulated, initiating the Fund for Maintenance and Development of Basic Education and Valorization of Education Professionals (FUNDEB), seeking to improve the quality of basic education, improving the allocation of resources and infrastructure of the school environment. The objective of the present study is to analyze if there is a relation of the expenditure per student, through FUNDEB, with the quality of public education, measured through the municipal school performance in a Brazil test, called Prova Brasil, between the years of 2013 and 2015, through panel data. The results, based on the fixed effects model, indicate that there is a positive relationship between student expenditures and quality of education, even in low proportions, which agrees with the literature. This suggests that the policy has been effective in increasing student performance.