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A New Approach to Social Assistance: Latin America’s Experience with Conditional Cash Transfer Programs
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Conditional cash transfer as discussed by the authors is a departure from more traditional approaches to social assistance, that represents an innovative, and increasingly popular channel for the delivery of social services that represents a demand-side complement to the supply of health, and education services.Abstract:
Conditional cash transfers are a departure from more traditional approaches to social assistance, that represents an innovative, and increasingly popular channel for the delivery of social services. Conditional cash transfers provide money to poor families, contingent upon certain behavior, usually investments in human capital, such as sending children to school, or bringing them to health centers on a regular basis. They seek both to address traditional short-term income support objectives, as well as to promote the longer-term accumulation of human capital, by serving as a demand-side complement to the supply of health, and education services. Evaluation results from a first generation of programs reveal that this innovative design has been quite successful in addressing many of the criticisms of social assistance, such as poor poverty targeting, disincentive effects, and limited welfare impacts. There is clear evidence of success from programs in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Nicaragua in increasing enrollment rates, improving preventive health care and raising household consumption. Despite this promising evidence, many questions remain unanswered about conditional cash transfer programs, including the replicability of their success under different conditions, their role within a broader social protection system, and their long-term effectiveness in preventing the inter- generational transmission of poverty. One of the main challenges facing policymakers today is how to build off of the established success of conditional cash transfer programs, to tackle the more difficult issues of improving the quality of health, and education services, and providing a more holistic approach to both social protection, and chronic poverty.read more
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For Protection and Promotion: The Design and Implementation of Effective Safety Nets
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors aim to assist those concerned with social policy to understand why countries need social assistance, what kind of safety programs will serve those best and how to develop such programs for maximum effectiveness.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Experience of Conditional Cash Transfers in Latin America and the Caribbean
Sudhanshu Handa,Benjamin Davis +1 more
TL;DR: The authors discusses the experience of six conditional cash transfer programs in Latin America, a model of social safety-nets which has grown to dominate the social protection sector in the region during the past decade.
The nuts and bolts of Brazil's bolsa familia program : implementing conditional cash transfers in a decentralized context
TL;DR: The Bolsa Familia Program (BFP) as discussed by the authors is a conditional cash transfer (CCT) for extremely poor families in Brazil, which aims to reduce current poverty and inequality by providing a minimum level of income for extremely low income families.
References
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Book
Evaluation: A Systematic Approach
TL;DR: Programs, Policies and Evaluation Tailoring Evaluations Identifying Issues and Formulating Questions Assessing the Need for a Program Expressing and Assessing Program Theory Monitoring Program Process and Performance Strategies for Impact Assessment Randomized Designs for Impact assessment Quasi-Experimental Impact Assessments Assessment of Full-Coverage Programs Measuring Efficiency.
Journal ArticleDOI
Evaluation: A Systematic Approach
School Subsidies for the Poor: Evaluating the Mexican Progresa Poverty Program. Center Discussion Paper.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors evaluate how the Progresa Program, which provides poor mothers in rural Mexico with education grants, has affected enrollment and extrapolate to the lifetime schooling and the earnings of adults to approximate the internal rate of return on the public schooling subsidies as they increase expected private wages.
Journal ArticleDOI
Evaluating the impact of conditional cash transfer programs
TL;DR: Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) as discussed by the authors is an alternative to more traditional social assistance programs and a demand-side complement to the supply of health and education services in developing economies.
Book
Administering Targeted Social Programs in Latin America: From Platitudes to Practice
TL;DR: In this article, the authors focus on the targeting outcomes and the administrative costs, options and requirements of targeting mechanisms in a variety of social programs in Latin America, assuming that all the programs were aimed generally at the poor and that targeting a food supplement program is much the same as targeting the cast transfer program or and education program.