Devemos unificar as idades de elegibilidade das previdências urbana e rural?

Rural workers in Brazil can access old-age pensions five years earlier than urban workers. The objective of this study is to evaluate whether unifying the ages of eligibility among these groups (a measure proposed in the last failed pension reform) makes sense from a comparative perspective, and considering the social risks faced by these two groups. This study is based on administrative records from the National Institute of Social Security (Instituto Nacional do Seguro Social - INSS), and data from the 2015 wave of the National Household Sample Survey (Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicílios - PNAD) and from the 2013 wave of the National Health Survey (Pesquisa Nacional de Saúde - PNS), both conducted by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística - IBGE). International experience suggests that having different ages of eligibility for old-age pensions for rural and urban workers is, at best, an unusual practice. Survival analysis (using both the Kaplan-Meier procedure and the Cox model) performed on INSS administrative records reveals that rural pensioners do not live less than urban ones. Whereas rural workers are disproportionately affected by social and health risks, they comprise a minority of the people living under vulnerable social and health conditions in absolute terms. The conclusion is that there seems to be no solid rationale for having a lower (and arbitrary) retirement age for rural workers.