A good example of public policy was BEm (Emergency Employment and Income Preservation Benefit), highlights the researcher. It was created due to the pandemic and aimed to reduce working hours and salaries proportionally and temporarily suspend employment contracts so that jobs could be preserved during critical moments.
Mazzei exemplifies the equal pay law as a policy made with good use of data. Today statistics show that there is a salary difference between men and women, but nothing was done in practice about it. In July last year, President Lula sanctioned the law that establishes equal pay between men and women who perform the same role, with fines for companies that disregard the rule.
Although the existing data is good, it is difficult to manipulate, says Magalhães. The expert cites Pnad Contínua: IBGE publishes microdata, which can be used by qualified researchers, but there are some limitations in crossing important information when building a public policy. According to the expert, the system is rigid and insufficient for the public policy manager to evaluate the whole in its complexity. He uses Pnad as an example, which does not allow data to be crossed simultaneously. The researcher can check the number of unemployed people by age or race, but cannot know how many white or black people in a given age group are unemployed.
The problem is much more about looking at this data and seeing what they are saying than not having the statistics. They are there and they just don’t do enough about it. I would say that today the biggest issue is whether public policy itself can use this data.
Mário Magalhães, specialist in public policies and government management
Some bodies are able to cross-reference data, but not all. Magalhães says that some managers do not have data processing capacity and depend on requesting information from the bodies that released the data, which are not always able to meet the demand.
Some areas of some ministries have this research, but it is not available either to the general public or to academia. Sometimes you have people at universities who have this skill, usually in statistics departments. If you take the economics and sociology departments, they don’t have specialized people who can work with this microdata in an authentic way. Normally, it depends on someone doing this to be able to develop your study.
Mário Magalhães, specialist in public policies and government management
