PROGRESA and Its Impacts on the Welfare of Rural Households in Mexico

PROGRESA and Its Impacts on the Welfare of Rural Households in Mexico PDF Author: Emmanuel Skoufias
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN: 0896291421
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 98

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Book Description
PROGRESA is one of the Mexican government's major programs aimed at developing the human capital of poor households. In early 1998, IFPRI was asked to assist Mexico's government to determine if PROGRESA was functioning as it was intended to. This research report synthesizes IFPRI's findings about PROGRESA's impact and operation. The majority of IFPRI's findings suggest that PROGRESA's combination of education, health, and nutrition interventions into one integrated package has had a significant positive impact on the welfare and human capital of poor rural families. The report will interest researchers, policymakers, and advisers seeking a better sense of the basic elements of a program that can be effective in alleviating poverty in the short and long run.

PROGRESA and Its Impacts on the Welfare of Rural Households in Mexico

PROGRESA and Its Impacts on the Welfare of Rural Households in Mexico PDF Author: Emmanuel Skoufias
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780896291423
Category : Developing countries
Languages : en
Pages : 84

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Book Description


Mexico's PROGRESA

Mexico's PROGRESA PDF Author: Quentin Wodon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
PROGRESA (Programa de Educacion, Salud y Alimentacion) is an innovative Mexican program that provides cash transfers to poor rural households, on condition that their children attend school and their family visits local health centers regularly. Confronted with rising poverty after the economic crisis of 1995, the Mexican government progressively changed its poverty reduction strategy, ending universal tortilla subsidies and instead funding new investment in human capital through PROGRESA. The program gives cash grants to poor rural households, provided their children attend school for 85 percent of school days and the household, visit public health clinics and participate in educational workshops on health and nutrition. Founded in 1997, PROGRESA grew to cover around 2.6 million families by the end of 1999, the equivalent of 40 percent of all rural families, and one in nine families nationally. Operating in 31 of the 32 states, in 50,000 localities and 2,000 municipalities, its 1999 budget of US$777 million equaled 0.2 percent of Mexico's gross domestic product. The high level of funding for PROGRESA, and reduced funding for other programs, was based on a deliberate policy decision - to favor programs that are better targeted to the poor, which involve co-responsibility by beneficiaries, and which promote long-term behavioral change.

Conditional Cash Transfers

Conditional Cash Transfers PDF Author: Ariel Fiszbein
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN: 0821373536
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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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.

Shock Waves

Shock Waves PDF Author: Stephane Hallegatte
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN: 1464806748
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
Ending poverty and stabilizing climate change will be two unprecedented global achievements and two major steps toward sustainable development. But the two objectives cannot be considered in isolation: they need to be jointly tackled through an integrated strategy. This report brings together those two objectives and explores how they can more easily be achieved if considered together. It examines the potential impact of climate change and climate policies on poverty reduction. It also provides guidance on how to create a “win-win†? situation so that climate change policies contribute to poverty reduction and poverty-reduction policies contribute to climate change mitigation and resilience building. The key finding of the report is that climate change represents a significant obstacle to the sustained eradication of poverty, but future impacts on poverty are determined by policy choices: rapid, inclusive, and climate-informed development can prevent most short-term impacts whereas immediate pro-poor, emissions-reduction policies can drastically limit long-term ones.

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


Examining the Impacts of Progresa-Oportunidades on Poverty and Inequality

Examining the Impacts of Progresa-Oportunidades on Poverty and Inequality PDF Author: David Jacobo Calles Montaño
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
In a short period of time, Conditional Cash Transfer programs (CCTs) have expanded throughout Latin America and beyond, becoming one of the main approaches to combat poverty at the global level. Among the pioneers of these types of programs is Progresa-Oportunidades, which was implemented to invest in the human capital of the rural poor with the goal of enhancing their productivity, thereby, helping to insert them into more profitable labour markets. The central argument of this research is that Progresa-Oportunidades is not only limited in its ability to reduce poverty, but is also contributing to increasing regional and intraregional inequality. In addition, the program has become a contributing factor to the worsening of labour conditions in Mexico. I argue that Progresa-Oportunidades has been an integral component of Mexico's neoliberal development strategy, aiming to relocate subsistence farmers while providing cheap labour to other sectors of the economy. However, the failure of neoliberal policies to produce sustained economic growth and jobs, particularly in those rural areas where the program operates, has resulted in rural out-migration to urban and semi-urban areas. The result of this out-migration is that the human capital and productivity gains, as well as a portion of the cash transfers themselves, are transferred from the country's poor rural areas to more dynamic urban centers. A case study is provided to illustrate the program's impact on poverty and inequality in the rural and very poor municipality of Las Margaritas, Chiapas.

The impact of conditional cash transfer programs on indigenous households in Latin America: Evidence from PROGRESA in Mexico

The impact of conditional cash transfer programs on indigenous households in Latin America: Evidence from PROGRESA in Mexico PDF Author: Quiñones, Esteban J.
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 48

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Book Description
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

Just Give Money to the Poor

Just Give Money to the Poor PDF Author: Joseph Hanlon
Publisher: Kumarian Press
ISBN: 1565493907
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
* Argues strongly for overlooked approach to development by showing how the poor use money in ways that confound stereotypical notions of aid and handouts * Team authored by foremost scholars in the development field Amid all the complicated economic theories about the causes and solutions to poverty, one idea is so basic it seems radical: just give money to the poor. Despite its skeptics, researchers have found again and again that cash transfers given to significant portions of the population transform the lives of recipients. Countries from Mexico to South Africa to Indonesia are giving money directly to the poor and discovering that they use it wisely “ to send their children to school, to start a business and to feed their families. Directly challenging an aid industry that thrives on complexity and mystification, with highly paid consultants designing ever more complicated projects, Just Give Money to the Pooroffers the elegant southern alternative “ bypass governments and NGOs and let the poor decide how to use their money. Stressing that cash transfers are not charity or a safety net, the authors draw an outline of effective practices that work precisely because they are regular, guaranteed and fair. This book, the first to report on this quiet revolution in an accessible way, is essential reading for policymakers, students of international development and anyone yearning for an alternative to traditional poverty-alleviation methods.

Natural Resources Management in Agriculture

Natural Resources Management in Agriculture PDF Author: Bekele Shiferaw
Publisher: CABI
ISBN: 0851998283
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
Part I: Introduction; Part II: Valuation of ecosystem services and biophysical indicators of NRM impacts; Part III: Methodological advances for a comprehensive impact assessment; Part IV: NRM impact assessment in practice.