Avaliação de Impacto do programa Paraíba Unida Pela Paz

Abstract

Despite Brazil being considered one of the most violent nations in the world, little has been used in the country of the consolidated strategies in the international literature as efficient programs for the prevention and reduction of violence. This is observed above all in the Northeast, a region that experienced a significant increase in violence in the 2000s and took the lead in the number of homicides in the country since 2009. Paraíba showed an even more expressive growth in violent crimes, becoming in 2011 the third state with the highest homicide rate in Brazil. That same year, the state government launched the “Paraíba Unida Pela Paz” Program and, in the following years it was observed a reduction in the number of homicides at about 30%. Thus, the main goal of this paper lied on carrying out an impact evaluation of the program over the number of homicides. For this, data were used at municipal level in the period from 2008 to 2017, and through the combination of the Propensity Score Matching (PSM) and Differences in Differences (DD) methods. Accordingly, the main results show that the intervention had an impact of 15% on the number of homicides, and when analyzing the heterogeneous impact, this effects was larger and more robust over the young people aged 15 to 29 years (14%) and the black population (18%).