Regressivity of Public Spending: Tertiary vs. Primary Education

Double ratio of per-student public spending, tertiary over primary education, Brazil, 1933–2010.

Overview

This figure tracks how unequal Brazilian public spending on education was, comparing how much the government spent per tertiary student against how much it spent per early-primary pupil, from 1933 to 2010. A ratio far above 1 means tertiary students — historically a small, better-off share of the population — received far more public money per head than primary pupils.

Methodology

The double ratio divides public spending per tertiary student by spending per pupil in early primary education (EF1); the dotted reference line marks equal per-student spending. On the logarithmic scale, the fall from 66 times in 1933 to under 9 times in 2010 spans nearly an order of magnitude, yet spending never approached parity — the elitist bias in Brazilian public education spending narrowed considerably over the twentieth century without disappearing.

How to Cite

If you use this figure or the pipeline behind it, please cite both the dissertation and this specific analysis. References follow APA 7th edition.

Dissertation (in preparation; the entry will be updated after the defense):

Mançano, T. (2026). Inequality in access to tertiary education in Brazil: Household incomes, reforming policies, and the politics of who gets in (1990s–2020s) [Unpublished master’s thesis]. University of São Paulo.

This figure and pipeline:

Mançano, T. (2026, July 12). Regressivity of public spending: Tertiary vs. primary education [Figure and reproducible pipeline]. Open Data Analysis. https://mancano-tales.github.io/open-data-analysis/posts/educabr2-expenditure-regressivity/

In text: (Mançano, 2026) — when citing several analyses from this catalog in the same work, APA distinguishes them as 2026a, 2026b, … in the order they appear in the reference list.

BibTeX:

@mastersthesis{Mancano2026Thesis,
  author = {Man\c{c}ano, Tales},
  title  = {Inequality in Access to Tertiary Education in Brazil: Household
            Incomes, Reforming Policies, and the Politics of Who Gets In
            (1990s--2020s)},
  school = {University of S\~{a}o Paulo},
  year   = {2026},
  type   = {Master's thesis},
  note   = {Unpublished; Graduate Program in Political Science}
}

@misc{Mancano2026_educabr2_expenditure_regressivity,
  author       = {Man\c{c}ano, Tales},
  title        = {Regressivity of public spending: Tertiary vs. primary education},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = jul,
  howpublished = {Open Data Analysis, \url{https://mancano-tales.github.io/open-data-analysis/posts/educabr2-expenditure-regressivity/}},
  note         = {Figure and reproducible pipeline. Source code: \url{https://github.com/mancano-tales/open-data-analysis}, folder posts/educabr2-expenditure-regressivity/. Accessed YYYY-MM-DD}
}

A permanent version (Git tag + Zenodo DOI) will be linked here once the dissertation is defended; until then, cite the page URL above and add the date you accessed it (source code: https://github.com/mancano-tales/open-data-analysis, folder posts/educabr2-expenditure-regressivity/).

Pipeline

Scripts for this analysis:

• Plotting: plot.R — writes the figure to output/figures/educabr2-expenditure-regressivity/ — compare it with this post’s thumbnail.png
• Upstream pipeline: no upstream script in this repository — the data comes embedded in the R package educabr2 (remotes::install_github("mancano-tales/educabr2")).

Reproducibility

Tier: A (cross-repo)

This pipeline depends on the public R package educabr2 (remotes::install_github("mancano-tales/educabr2")), which already embeds the necessary data.