Nineteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

Classified as the result of an extreme or intense phenomenon on the social system, natural disasters can affect human life in several dimensions. At macroeconomic levels, compromising economic growth, infrastructure, and employment levels. In the microeconomic sphere, affecting the access to basic services, such as human capital formation, earnings and health or nutrition. This research analyzes the impact of natural disasters on the students’ tests scores in Portuguese and mathematics, dropout rates and grade promotion in Brazil. A municipal panel data set was created from 2009 to 2019 using data from the Integrated Disaster Information System (S2ID) of the National Secretariat for Civil Defense and the National Institute of Educational Studies and Research (INEP) from the Ministry of Education. The results show that natural disasters in the Northeast region of Brazil were responsible for reductions in students’ proficiency, decrease in grade promotion and increase in dropout rates. This study shows the negative effect of natural disasters on human capital and may serve as a tool to orient public policies to mitigate the problem, better protecting the society.