The opportunities and challenges for artistic workers: thoughts from the Capabilities Approach
The proposed master's thesis will be composed of two essays about the labour market in arts and entertainment in Brazil. Despite being independent, because they have different methodologies and objectives, they focused on the same subject and use the same framework, Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum’s Capabilities Approach, as the main theoretical reference for interpreting the results. Both of them discuss factors that could increase deprivations. They include analyses of the economic and social restrictions to choose working as artists. The first essay is more developed and almost completed. Its main goal is to identify inequalities of opportunities for women in arts labour market. It describes workers in artistic sector in Brazil and identifies the socioeconomically vulnerable groups using the microdata of the 2000 and 2010 Demographic Censuses published by IBGE. The study intents to create an opportunities index for the artistic labour market in 2000 and 2010, using John Roemer's suggestion of equality of opportunities (1998), which will be analyzed by the capabilities approach. Applying Shapley decomposition procedure we will obtain an indicator of the inequalities of opportunities for women in the artistic labor market in Brazil. We expect that the results indicate the importance of cultural policies to improve achievements and freedom. The second essay remains a work in progress. Its main purpose is to identify relations between public cultural policies and their effects on the artistic labour market. The strategy is to analyse the effect of internet access on the availability of cultural equipments in the municipalities and so the relation of these equipments with the labour market in the sector of arts and entertainment. The main database is the Municipal Basic Information Survey (MUNIC) published by IBGE. Discussions on the economic importance of culture are usually associated with issues of economic development and are measured in terms of the return that investments in art and culture provide. The capabilities approach can broaden the understanding of the theme, emphasizing culture as a public good that is relevant to economic and social development, to stimulate the empowerment of vulnerable groups through art and culture.