Brazil suffers from generational inequality like no other country. Current budget and public policy decisions could have serious implications for our future.
Article 227 of our Constitution states that children and adolescents must be an absolute priority; In the event of a flood, for example, they must be rescued first. The article also explains that we, adults, are responsible for prioritizing youth.
However, data from the compilation of social indicators of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) released on Wednesday (3) provide a reliable picture of the violation of Article 227. Among children and adolescents aged 0 to 14 years, 40% are poor, a proportion five times higher than the proportion of the population aged 60 or over, 8%.
The report also indicates that the decline in poverty among the elderly population benefiting from Social Security is mainly linked to access to retirement and pensions, the values of which are periodically adjusted according to the minimum wage.
Ideally, we would like poverty to be completely eradicated, and we should celebrate Brazil’s relative success in reducing poverty among the elderly through social security mechanisms. However, we do not allocate the same effort and budget to children.
The consequences of experiencing poverty in childhood last throughout life and affect all dimensions of the future: education, health and the labor market, among others. Given these consequences, are other countries also allocating their priorities like Brazil?
According to data from the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), from the United Nations, in 2010, various countries in the world allocated to the population over 60 years of age, on average, twice as much as they allocated to the population aged 0 to 19 years. In Japan, for example, for every resource spent on young people, 2.2% is spent on older people.
The same report notes that while other countries in the world allocate twice that amount to the elderly, Brazil is the only country that sends more than six times its budget from young people to the elderly. Even in Latin America, countries allocate about three times the value of young people to older people. In other words, we are the only ones who have such a generational disparity.
This disparity occurs at a critical moment, when the fertility rate in Brazil, according to the 2022 demographic census, has reached its lowest level in history, at 1.55 children per woman. In Sweden, it is 1.52 children per woman in 2022, and in Denmark it is 1.55. Brazil has the same fertility rate as the Nordic countries, but not the same intergenerational budget allocations.
Perhaps the Constituent Assembly, when it wrote Article 227, thought about the attention we should pay to the care of our children. Right now, we’re moving towards fewer and fewer children and less and less budget for them. What will Brazil be like in a hundred years?
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