IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/oxford/v40y2024i3p642-655..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Affirmative action in Brazil: global lessons on racial justice and the fight to reduce social inequality

Author

Listed:
  • Andrew Francis-Tan
  • Maria Tannuri-Pianto

Abstract

Public policies intended to promote educational equity are common around the world. This paper examines Brazil’s experience with affirmative action (AA) in higher education, which holds lessons for other countries. In what follows, we describe the social and historical context, investigate trends in racial inequality, and review the literature on AA. To summarize, nationally representative data show that racial inequality in education has decreased since the early 2000s. AA emerged in the period after the transition from dictatorship to democracy had allowed political mobilization to flourish. AA dramatically increased the enrolment of disadvantaged groups in college. Students admitted through AA typically had academic outcomes comparable to other students, and some, though not all, enjoyed sizeable labour market gains. AA also influenced patterns of racial identification. However, the evidence on pre-college human capital is mixed.

Suggested Citation

  • Andrew Francis-Tan & Maria Tannuri-Pianto, 2024. "Affirmative action in Brazil: global lessons on racial justice and the fight to reduce social inequality," Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Oxford University Press and Oxford Review of Economic Policy Limited, vol. 40(3), pages 642-655.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:oxford:v:40:y:2024:i:3:p:642-655.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/oxrep/grae027
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:oxford:v:40:y:2024:i:3:p:642-655.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/oxrep .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.