Transição à vida adulta dos jovens no Nordeste: desigualdades, educação e mercado de trabalho no século XXI

Abstract

The literature on youth has pointed a diversification in ways of being young, and in Brazil structural inequalities play an important role in this process. This diversity is also reflected in the transition to adulthood, in which the trajectories of new cohorts of young people in the process of acquiring adult status become more heterogeneous, both among themselves and in relation to previous cohorts. These differences, whether intra- or intergenerational, can result in so-called 'non-transitions', such as 'NEET youth'. The difficulties young people face in the labor market, which persist and worsen in certain economic conditions, affect the transition from the role of student to that of worker. The resulting difficulty in achieving financial independence also influences other dimensions of the transition. In this context, this thesis aims to investigate the transition modalities to adulthood among young people in the Brazilian Northeast at the beginning of the 21st century, considering the effects of social, regional and economic inequalities on educational and occupational transitions, with an emphasis on the situation of young people without education and without work, through demographic approaches. The Northeast region is analyzed, which combines conventional patterns and emerging dynamics, and continues to register greater vulnerabilities in relation to other regions of Brazil, with regard to demographic, economic, educational and labor market insertion aspects. The research is based on the following central question: how does an unequal and uncertain context influence changes in the process of transition to adulthood at the turn of the 20th century into the 21st century? This question is composed of other more specific ones that favored the idealization of the thesis in two different essays. The first one aims to characterize the transition to adulthood in the Northeast region. The second one analyzes the influence of the labor market, indicative of the period effect, in the configuration of a more specific transition modality: young people without education and without work (NEET youth). For this, microdata from the Demographic Censuses of 1991 and 2010 (essay 1) and the PNAD of 1993, 1998, 2003, 2008 and 2013, as well as the PNADC of 2018 and 2023 (essay 2) are used. The main methods of analysis used are synthetic cohort entropy analysis (essay 1) and the AgePeriod-Cohort (APC) model with Multinomial Logit (essay 2). Together, the essays show that the unequal and uncertain context places education and work as contrasting forces in the standardization or destandardization between the transition modalities of young people in the Northeast, as well as in the configuration of the NEET modality. Amidst inequalities, young people with lower incomes or from rural areas have greater chances of becoming part of the NEETs, despite the more pronounced trend of homogenization as students and the notable growth in the chances of studying in more recent cohorts. The uncertainty, especially for these profiles, is evidenced by the establishment of occupational status as the main component of the growing heterogeneity among young people in the region, together with the direct relationship between the unemployment rate and the chances of becoming part of the NEETs.