Conditional Cash Transfers In Latin America

Conditional cash transfer programs (CCTs)—cash grants to poor families that are conditional on their participation in education, health, and nutrition services—have become a vital part of poverty reduction strategies in many countries, particularly in Latin America. In Conditional Cash Transfers in Latin America, the contributors analyze and synthesize evidence from case studies of CCTs in Brazil, Honduras, Mexico, and Nicaragua. The studies examine many aspects of CCTs, including the trends in development and political economy that fostered interest in them; their costs; their impacts on education, health, nutrition, and food consumption; and how CCT programs affect social relations shaped by gender, culture, and community. Throughout, the authors identify the strengths and weaknesses of CCTs and offer guidelines to those who design them.

It has been almost two decades since conditional cash transfer programs first appeared on the agendas of multilateral agencies and politicians. Latin America has often been used as a testing ground for these programs, which consist of transfers of money to subsections of the population upon meeting certain conditions, such as sending their children to school or having them vaccinated. Money from the Government in Latin America takes a comparative view of the effects of this regular transfer of money, which comes with obligations, on rural communities. Drawing on a variety of data, taken from different disciplinary perspectives, these chapters help to build an understanding of the place of conditional cash transfer programsin rural families and households, in individuals’ aspirations and visions, in communities’ relationships to urban areas, and in the overall character of these rural societies. With case studies from Chile, Mexico, Peru, Brazil and Colombia, this book will interest scholars and researchers of Latin American anthropology, sociology, development, economics and politics.

Summarizes experience with conditional cash transfer or "co-responsibility" (CCT) programmes in Latin America and the Caribbean, over a period lasting more than 15 years.

Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs aim to reduce poverty by making welfare programs conditional upon the receivers' actions. That is, the government only transfers the money to persons who meet certain criteria. These criteria may include enrolling children into public schools, getting regular check-ups at the doctor's office, receiving vaccinations, or the like. They have been hailed as a way of reducing inequality and helping households break out of a vicious cycle whereby poverty is transmitted from one generation to another. Do these and other claims make sense? Are they supported by the available empirical evidence? This volume seeks to answer these and other related questions. Specifically, it lays out a conceptual framework for thinking about the economic rationale for CCTs; it reviews the very rich evidence that has accumulated on CCTs; it discusses how the conceptual framework and the evidence on impacts should inform the design of CCT programs in practice; and it discusses how CCTs fit in the context of broader social policies. The authors show that there is considerable evidence that CCTs have improved the lives of poor people and argue that conditional cash transfers have been an effective way of redistributing income to the poor. They also recognize that even the best-designed and managed CCT cannot fulfill all of the needs of a comprehensive social protection system. They therefore need to be complemented with other interventions, such as workfare or employment programs, and social pensions.

Unlike most development initiatives, conditional cash transfer programs recently introduced in the Latin America and the Caribbean region have been subject to rigorous evaluations of their effectiveness. These programs provide money to poor families, conditional on certain behavior, usually investments in human capital-such as sending children to school or bringing them to health centers on a regular basis. Rawlings and Rubio review the experience in evaluating the impact of these programs, exploring the application of experimental and quasi-experimental evaluation methods and summarizing results from programs launched in Brazil, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, and Nicaragua. Evaluation results from the first generation of programs in Brazil, Mexico, and Nicaragua show that conditional cash transfer programs are effective in promoting human capital accumulation among poor households. There is clear evidence of success in increasing enrollment rates, improving preventive health care, and raising household consumption. Despite this promising evidence, many questions remain unanswered about the impact of conditional cash transfer programs, including those concerning their effectiveness under different country conditions and the sustainability of the welfare impacts.

Conditional cash transfers(CCTs) are widely used antipoverty measuresin Latin America, and manysuch programs include indigenous beneficiaries.However, concerns have been raised that the indigenous poor,who have historically been marginalized,may not benefit from CCTsas much as the nonindigenouspopulation, owing to cultural as well as geographic factors. Even so, rigorous evidenceshowing this effect is limited. We assessedthis issue in the context of PROGRESA (Programa de Educación, Salud, y Alimenación), an integrated approach to poverty alleviation in Mexico, in which over one-thirdofbeneficiaries were indigenous at the program’s inceptionin 1998. A feature of the program’s initial targetingwasthat indigenous and nonindigenous beneficiaries were drawn from geographically similar areas, minimizing the potential for geographic factors to lead to differential impacts.Despite an extensive literatureshowing positive average impacts of PROGRESAon health and education outcomes, few studieshave disaggregatedthese effects by indigenous status. Using the randomized assignment of initial programrollout, we estimatedPROGRESA’simpactson a range of health and education indicators, distinctly for indigenous and nonindigenousbeneficiaries.We foundthat, as of November 2000, PROGRESA had significant impacts on many health and education indicators among both indigenous and nonindigenous households in our sample; in addition, in aggregateacross most indicators, these impacts werevery similar. Our results indicate thatif geographic disadvantage for indigenous households can be minimized(a nontrivial endeavor),cultural factors may not pose an intrinsic barrier to indigenous householdsbenefiting from CCTprograms, and as such, CCTs canpromote humancapital accumulation amongboth indigenous and nonindigenous households