Ex-Ante Evaluation of Conditional Cash Transfer Programs

Ex-Ante Evaluation of Conditional Cash Transfer Programs PDF Author: Francois Bourguignon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Cash transfers targeted to poor people, but conditional on some behavior on their part - such as school attendance or regular visits to health care facilities - are being adopted in a growing number of developing countries. Even where ex-post impact evaluations have been conducted, a number of policy-relevant counterfactual questions have remained unanswered. These are questions about the potential impact of changes in program design - such as benefit levels or the choice of the means - test - on both the current welfare and the behavioral response of household members. Bourguignon, Ferreira, and Leite propose a method to simulate the effects of those alternative program designs on welfare and behavior based on microeconometrically estimated models of household behavior. In an application to Brazil's recently introduced federal Bolsa Escola program, the authors find a surprisingly strong effect of the conditionality on school attendance, but a muted impact of the transfers on the reduction of poverty and inequality levels. This paper - a product of the Poverty Team, Development Research Group - is part of a larger effort in the group to understand the impact of policies on the distribution of incomes.

Ex-Ante Evaluation of Conditional Cash Transfer Programs

Ex-Ante Evaluation of Conditional Cash Transfer Programs PDF Author: Francois Bourguignon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Cash transfers targeted to poor people, but conditional on some behavior on their part - such as school attendance or regular visits to health care facilities - are being adopted in a growing number of developing countries. Even where ex-post impact evaluations have been conducted, a number of policy-relevant counterfactual questions have remained unanswered. These are questions about the potential impact of changes in program design - such as benefit levels or the choice of the means - test - on both the current welfare and the behavioral response of household members. Bourguignon, Ferreira, and Leite propose a method to simulate the effects of those alternative program designs on welfare and behavior based on microeconometrically estimated models of household behavior. In an application to Brazil's recently introduced federal Bolsa Escola program, the authors find a surprisingly strong effect of the conditionality on school attendance, but a muted impact of the transfers on the reduction of poverty and inequality levels. This paper - a product of the Poverty Team, Development Research Group - is part of a larger effort in the group to understand the impact of policies on the distribution of incomes.

Ex-ante evaluation of conditional cash transfer programs : the case of bolsa escola

Ex-ante evaluation of conditional cash transfer programs : the case of bolsa escola PDF Author: François Bourguignon
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN:
Category : Brazil
Languages : en
Pages : 32

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Book Description
Cash transfers targeted to poor people, but conditional on some behavior on their part, such as school attendance or regular visits to health care facilities, are being adopted in a growing number of developing countries. Even where ex-post impact evaluations have been conducted, a number of policy-relevant counterfactual questions have remained unanswered. These are questions about the potential impact of changes in program design, such as benefit levels or the choice of the means-test, on both the current welfare and the behavioral response of household members. This paper proposes a method to simulate the effects of those alternative program designs on welfare and behavior, based on microeconometrically estimated models of household behavior. In an application to Brazil's recently introduced federal Bolsa Escola program, the authors find a surprisingly strong effect of the conditionality on school attendance, but a muted impact of the transfers on the reduction of current poverty and inequality levels.

Conditional Cash Transfers

Conditional Cash Transfers PDF Author: Ariel Fiszbein
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN: 9780821373538
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
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.

Conditional Cash Transfers, Adult Work Incentives, and Poverty

Conditional Cash Transfers, Adult Work Incentives, and Poverty PDF Author: Emmanuel Skoufias
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN:
Category : Incentives in industry
Languages : en
Pages : 38

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Book Description
"Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs aim to alleviate poverty through monetary and in-kind benefits, as well as reduce future levels of poverty by encouraging investments in education, health, and nutrition. The success of CCT programs at reducing poverty depends on whether, and the extent to which, cash transfers affect adult work incentives. The authors examine whether the PROGRESA program of Mexico affects adult participation in the labor market and overall adult leisure time, and they link these effects to the impact of the program on poverty. Using the experimental design of PROGRESA's evaluation sample, the authors find that the program does not have any significant effect on adult labor force participation and leisure time. Their findings on adult work incentives are reinforced further by the result that PROGRESA leads to a substantial reduction in poverty. The poverty reduction effects are stronger for the poverty gap and severity of poverty measures."--World Bank web site.

The World Bank Research Observer

The World Bank Research Observer PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Computer network resources
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description


Evaluating the Impact of Conditional Cash Transfer Programs

Evaluating the Impact of Conditional Cash Transfer Programs PDF Author: Laura B. Rawlings
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN:
Category : Evaluacion de proyectos
Languages : en
Pages : 32

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Book Description
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.

How Good Are Ex Ante Program Evaluation Techniques? The Case of School Enrollment in PROGRESA

How Good Are Ex Ante Program Evaluation Techniques? The Case of School Enrollment in PROGRESA PDF Author: Fabian Bornhorst
Publisher: INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND
ISBN: 9781451873344
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 35

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Book Description
This paper evaluates a microsimulation technique by comparing the simulated outcome of a program with its actual effect. The ex ante evaluation is carried out for a conditional cash transfer program, where poor households were given money if the children attended school. A model of occupational choice is used to simulate the expected impact of the program. The results suggest that the transfer would indeed increase school attendance and do more so among girls than boys. While the simulated effect tends to be larger than the actual effect, the latter lies within bootstrapped confidence intervals of the simulation.

Social Assistance and Conditional Cash Transfers

Social Assistance and Conditional Cash Transfers PDF Author: Sri Wening Handayani
Publisher: Asian Development Bank
ISBN: 9292547607
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
The regional workshop, held on 23-24 July 2009 at the Asian Development Bank (ADB), brought together people from ADB, its developing member countries, partner development agencies, research institutes, and civil society organizations to share their views and experience on social protection and its modalities, especially the conditional cash transfers (CCTs). The regional workshop served as a forum for discussing ideas, experiences, and information on social assistance and CCTs.

Equity and Well-Being

Equity and Well-Being PDF Author: Hyun Hwa Son
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113657932X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Equity is an abstract concept covering philosophical issues such as fairness and social justice, making its definition and measurement complex. This volume tackles these complexities head-on. The book is enriched with many empirical analyses and provides a comprehensive analysis of equity ranging from concepts and measurements to empirical illustrations and policy implications. After an extensive discussion on equity in the introduction, this volume begins with a chapter on well-being where the concepts of functioning and capability are discussed. This is followed by a few chapters on what an equitable distribution is and how equity can be measured. The volume then provides a definition and a methodology to measure equitable growth, examining the relationship between growth, inequality, and poverty. It also presents various empirical illustrations and country-specific experiences with three country case studies which assess whether publicly provided health and education services are equitable in developing Asia, examining the extent to which these social services favor the poor as well as the policy challenges to a more equitable delivery of these services. Finally, these country studies provide evidence–based policy recommendations to improve equity in social service delivery in developing countries. Achieving social equity has long been an important policy goal. There are relatively few studies on equity. This book aims to help fill this gap with an in-depth analysis of the issues associated with equity, covering its concept, measurement, and policy practices and implications.

An Evaluation of the Performance of Regression Discontinuity Design on Progresa

An Evaluation of the Performance of Regression Discontinuity Design on Progresa PDF Author: Hielke Buddelmeyer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
While providing the most reliable method of evaluating social programs, randomized experiments in industrial and developing countries alike are accompanied by political risks and ethical issues that jeopardize the chances of adopting them. Buddelmeyer and Skoufias use a unique data set from rural Mexico collected for the purpose of evaluating the impact of the PROGRESA poverty alleviation program to examine the performance of a quasi-experimental estimator, the regression discontinuity design (RDD). Using as a benchmark the impact estimates based on the experimental nature of the sample, the authors examine how estimates differ when the RDD is used as the estimator for evaluating program impact on two key indicators - child school attendance and child work. Overall the performance of the RDD was remarkably good. The RDD estimates of program impact agreed with the experimental estimates in 10 out of the 12 possible cases. The two cases in which the RDD failed to reveal any significant program impact on school attendance of boys and girls were in the first year of the program (round 3). RDD estimates comparable to the experimental estimates were obtained when the authors used as a comparison group children from noneligible households in the control localities. This paper - a product of the Poverty and Gender Unit, Latin America and the Caribbean Region - is part of a larger effort in the region to develop and apply rigorous methods in the evaluation of poverty alleviation programs.