Efeito do Programa Partiu Estágio no setor público do estado da Bahia: evidências para o período de 2017 a 2019

Abstract

Considering that internship activities are essential for providing university students with their first contact with what may potentially become their future labor market, this study focused on the Partiu Estágio program—an initiative by the government of the state of Bahia that has facilitated access to non-mandatory internship positions in public agencies and institutions since 2017. Data from the annual historical series of the Continuous PNAD, covering the period from 2012 to 2019, were used to test the hypothesis that the program increased the number of university students undertaking internships in public sector agencies in Bahia. To this end, the Synthetic Control Method was applied, considering Bahia as the treated unit and constructing the counterfactual (synthetic unit) based on lagged values of the dependent variable from the federative units that comprised the donor pool. Although the methodological assumption of perfect fit was satisfactorily met, the main result indicated that the program did not have a clear effect on the response variable. Several factors may explain the lack of impact observed in this study, such as the use of survey data rather than administrative records, and the fact that only one selection process was conducted in 2018, which reduced the number of available positions compared to other periods.