From Struggle to Opportunity

The purpose of the note is to inform the design of policies and instruments that can enhance labor market outcomes of Brazil’s poor and vulnerable populations. Global and regional experiences show that active labor market programs, and more broadly economic inclusion interventions, both at the strategic level and for territorial implementation, require population-specific labor market diagnostics. And aggregate labor statistics do not portray adequately the specific situation of the poor and vulnerable. This note studies how Brazil’s poor and vulnerable engage in the labor market and in public labor market policies, or fail to do so, according to individual, family and location characteristics. The authors focus on two broad populations of interest: work-able adults in households living below the Cadastro Único poverty line (the poor), and its subset of beneficiaries of the conditional cash transfer Bolsa Familia (BF), the country’s largest social program in 2019, and named Auxilio Brasil (AB).