Monday, February 21, 2011

Labor Force Projections in Brazil

Brazil has been experiencing a strong economy in the last few years. Even though it might seem a paradox, this recent economic growth pace has been a main concern for some analysts. One critical issue is the doubt whether Brazil is going to have enough qualified labor force to meet market’s demand if economic growth pace continues as observed in recent years. Added to this, another reason for uncertainty is that Brazil is now facing an accelerated aging process.

So, for the last months, I have been engaged in a research project at Ipea called
"Scenarios for the Brazilian labor market". I'm helping to build a demographic a projection methodology of skilled labor force suitable for Brazilian data. We are projecting as a first exercise the population with a bachelor's degree in engineering and related areas (time horizon 2020).

So I've decided I will try to post about this project whenever possible and maybe you guys can come up with some suggestions. This first post focuses on the male engineers captured by the Census 2000.

This chart shows the evolution of the population (male engineers) pyramid from 2000 to 2020. Darker lines represent the earlier projection years.




That's the aging (and dying) process isolated. In a future post, I'll present the projection results including the trends in the number of graduated students every year.