Obesidade adulta e o mercado de trabalho : uma análise para as 26 capitais estaduais e o distrito federal a partir das mudanças conjunturais entre 2006 e 2018

Abstract

Obesity is a public health problem that affects millions of people worldwide. Currently, in Brazil, this chronic condition has been growing rapidly. In addition to illnesses and direct costs (public and private), indirect costs related to lost productivity, absenteeism at work and the prejudice present in the daily lives of those who suffer from this condition have aroused the interest of several areas of knowledge, among them Economics, in an attempt to explain its causes and consequences. In this sense, this dissertation aims to assess the extent to which obesity affects the participation of men and women of working age in the workforce, considering a scenario of economic growth followed by recession in the 26 state capitals and the Federal District. For this, secondary data from the Surveillance of Risk and Protection Factors for Chronic Diseases by Telephone Survey from the Department of Informatics of the Brazilian Unified Health System (VIGITEL-DATASUS) were used to build an econometric model of pooled logit. The main results indicate that, in general, the relationship between obesity and the chances of employment is negative for women, while overweight favors men. In this perspective, society imposes standards of valorization of the body, to which being overweight generates a negative perception that enhances the insertion of obese women in the labor market. However, both men and women with obesity are the least penalized in a context of economic crisis. The divergence of reported results can be hypothetically attributed to the difference in placement in the labor market between different demographic groups in the face of variations in the economic situation, influenced by exogenous factors, such as the quota law and the low reserve salary of the obese population.