J-PAL LAC at 15: Strengthening labor market policies in Brazil

To celebrate fifteen years of J-PAL’s Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) office, we launched a new blog series titled “J-PAL LAC at 15.” The series thanks our partners for their support in expanding our presence in the region and highlights the milestones that have shaped our work in the region. In this third installment, we feature the Jobs and Opportunity Initiative Brazil (JOI Brazil), an important step in our commitment to addressing Brazil’s productive inclusion challenges through rigorous evidence and collaborative action. Learn more in the other installments, including how we work with donors to create a culture of evidence in LAC, how we are expanding  ECD programs in LAC thanks to implementing partners, and efforts to strengthen diversity and inclusion throughout our work.

In Brazil—the most populated country in LAC, with an estimated 216.4 million inhabitants in 2023—J-PAL LAC has broadened its reach, supported affiliates in identifying evaluation opportunities with the government and organizations, and provided trainings and a MOOC on Impact Evaluation. In 2021, in partnership with Insper, J-PAL LAC established its first office in the country. The same year, it launched the Jobs and Opportunity Initiative Brazil (JOI Brazil), its first initiative to improve labor market conditions in Brazil through the generation and use of rigorous evidence.

Addressing labor market challenges in Brazil

Many of the challenges in the Brazilian labor market involve the development of public policies and understanding their effectiveness in creating jobs and opportunities, as well as in reducing inequalities. Even with the recovery of the job market after the pandemic and the unemployment rate recently reaching 6.6 percent, one of the lowest levels in history, it is estimated that around 2 million people have been looking for a job for more than two years. There is an urgent need for evidence-based public policies that can make a real difference to solve this issue. In this context, it is important to improve the culture of impact evaluation informing policy in Brazil. In a country with more than 200 million inhabitants, programs, before or after their implementation, need to be evaluated to understand their effectiveness and cost-benefit.

JOI Brazil—which has the support of the Arymax Foundation,  B3 Social, Tide Setubal Foundation, Potencia Ventures, the Inter-American Development Bank, and Insper—marks a significant stride forward toward the institutionalization of evidence generation and use. The active search for implementing partners, in which we mapped the main agents of the public and private sector working on labor market issues, combined with launching requests for proposals (RFPs), and the expertise of the J-PAL network of researchers have allowed us to compose a research portfolio with great potential to inform decision makers on the formulation and improvement of public policies.

Initially, JOI Brazil’s RFPs covered exploratory studies in addition to pilots and full randomized evaluations, or RCTs. Exploratory studies were fundamental at the beginning of JOI Brazil as they allowed J-PAL invited and affiliated researchers to map opportunities and consolidate partnerships with implementers for programs that could be evaluated in the future. This was the case, for example, of a project on the assessment and development of non-cognitive skills, which was first awarded funding for an exploratory study in 2022 and the following year, received funding for a full RCT.

Furthermore, JOI Brazil and J-PAL affiliated researchers were able to establish partnerships with key partners to evaluate relevant and innovative job projects and programs at both the state and federal levels. For example, we developed  partnerships with the Ministry of Labor to investigate workplace accident reduction policies, with the Government of the State of São Paulo to evaluate the integration of technical education into high school (Novotec), and with the Central Bank to investigate the effects of PIX (an instant payment system) on the job market and entrepreneurship. 

In total, seventeen projects were funded across four RFPs, and we are in the middle of a new funding cycle that will finish at the end of 2024, which will further strengthen our research portfolio.

For the coming years of JOI Brazil, our biggest challenge will be to disseminate the results of the projects financed by the initiative and leverage the use of this evidence to formulate and improve public policies. We hope that the initiative's greatest legacy will be the consolidation of the importance of impact assessment and the use of evidence to foster a job market with more opportunities and less inequality. We’ve started these dissemination efforts with a series of publications, "Evidence in Labor Market Policies and Implications for Brazil," which review existing research around critical labor market issues and considers its policy implications for the Brazilian context. 

JOI Brazil allows us to respond to unsolved questions in labor markets and inform public policies to help improve access to jobs in the country, as well as create strong partnerships between academia, government, and organizations. These efforts represent an important step in our commitment to improving lives through evidence-based public policies over the past fifteen years.