“…In a paper published in the Brazilian Journal of Political Economy, Wjuniski (2013) attempts to explain why Brazilian education lagged behind other countries throughout the 20 th century. His explanation is not a new one: Brazilian elites had little interest in expanding mass education and gave priority to higher education, as other scholars have also suggested (Plank, 1996;Plank et al., 1996;Brown, 2002;Schwartzman, 2004;Valle Silva, 2008;Ansell, 2010;Kosack, 2012;Kang, 2011Kang, , 2017. The novelty of his approach comes from his methodology: the author uses previously compiled data on education spending and tries to detect structural breaks through an econometric test proposed by Perron (1998, 2003).…”