The effect of changes in educational composition on adult female mortality in Brazil

The last century in Brazil witnessed profound social, economic and demographic changes. According to the Bureau of Census, female life expectancy at birth increased from 34.6 years in 1910 to 77.26 years in 2010. At the same time, the educational composition of the population has changed dramatically. In the 1940s, only 25 percent of the children aged 5 to 14 years were enrolled in school. Currently, nearly all children aged 7 and 14 years attend school, and positive advances in attendance rates have been also documented for the secondary and tertiary education. In this article, we examine the extent to which changes in the age-specific distribution of education, between 1960 and 2010, have contributed to the decline in adult mortality among women in Brazil. Our analysis follows other applications in the literature (e.g. Preston and Stokes 2011) to measure the reduction in mortality that would occur if exposure to specific risk factors were changed to a counterfactual level, also known as the population attributable fraction. The effects are not trivial: about 41% of life expectancy gains at age 30, between 1960 and 2010, are attributable to changes in educational composition of the female population.