Region, Industry, and Intergenerational Status Transmission in Urban Brazil

This article presents a cautious analysis about regional and industrial variations in the process of status transmission in Brazil. It draws upon a disparate literature spanning that on the organizational structures of industries, the socioeconomic patterns of development, and modernization theory to derive testable hypotheses. The hypothesis tests are based on the estimation of Two-Level Hierarchical Linear Models (HLM). The dependent variable is the socioeconomic status of one's occupation. The first level independent variables represent individual characteristics (sex, age, schooling, and the father's socioeconomic status of occupation). The second level independent variables represent economic sectors' characteristics (based on regional and industrial segmentations). The data for the hypothesis tests come from the Brazilian National Household Sample Surveys (PNADs) from 1973, 1982, 1988, and 1996. The main hypothesis tests are related to the "slope as outcome" model. It is tested whether the second level variables (related to the regional/industrial segmentation) have any impact on the effect of the father's socioeconomic status on the socioeconomic status of his sons/daughters. In other words, it is assessed whether economic segmentation variables mediate the intergenerational status transmission in Brazil. The final results show that neither regional and industrial segmentations nor economic development levels seem to have much a role as mediators of the process of intergenerational transmission of occupational status in Brazil. This brings to the conclusion that the process of intergenerational status transmission in Brazil is very stable in both cross-sectional and temporal ways.