Making Conditional Cash Transfer Programs More Efficient : Designing for Maximum Effect of the Conditionality

By A. de Janvry, E. Sadoulet. 2006

298 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Conditional cash transfer programs are now used extensively to encourage poor parents to increase investments in their children's human capital. These programs can be large and expensive, motivating a quest for greater efficiency through increased impact of the programs' imposed conditions on human capital formation. This requires designing the programs' targeting and calibration rules specifically to achieve this result. Using data from the Progresa randomized experiment in Mexico, this article shows that large efficiency gains can be achieved by taking into account how much the probability of a child's enrollment is affected by a conditional transfer. Rules for targeting and calibration can be made easy to implement by selecting indicators that are simple, observable, and verifiable and that cannot be manipulated by beneficiaries. The Mexico case shows that these efficiency gains can be achieved without increasing inequality among poor households.

Subfields: Nutrition and Dietetics, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/046e6f63032b3497117d5bbfa59a4036a6480765

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Citations in the corpus

A credible approach for measuring inframarginal participation in energy efficiency programs (2014, background): “…giving (Feldstein and Clotfelter, 1976), subsidies for building low-income housing (Sinai and Waldfogel, 2005), conditional cash transfer programs (De Janvry and Sadoulet, 2006), pollution offset programs (Schneider, 2007), and environmental conservation programs (Sánchez-Azofeifa et al., 2007).”
Forest Conservation and Slippage: Evidence from Mexico’s National Payments for Ecosystem Services Program (2012, background): “One concern is that programs are not effective at inducing additional forest conservation because they are paying landowners who would have kept land in forest even in the absence of payments (e.g., see de Janvry and Sadoulet 2006; AlixGarcia, de Janvry, and Sadoulet.”
How Much Are We Willing To Pay to Send Poor Adolescents to School?: Simulating Changes to Mexico`s Oportunidades in Urban Areas (2009, unknown): “Recent studies suggest that the Oportunidades program has a small impact on primary school attendance of poor children in Mexico (de Janvry and Sadoulet, 2006; Parker, 2003; Schultz, 2004, for rural areas; and Behrman et al., 2006, for urban areas).”
Conditional cash transfers and female schooling: the impact of the female school stipend programme on public school enrolments in Punjab, Pakistan (2007, unknown): “…10.1080/00036840802167376 I. Introduction Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programmes targeted to poor households are rapidly becoming a key policy instrument used by developing countries to reduce poverty and increase human capital investments (Janvry and Sadoulet, 2006).”
Must Conditional Cash Transfer Programs be Conditioned to be Effective? The Impact of Conditioning Transfers on School Enrollment in Mexico (2011, background): “Studies that focus on the impact of PROGRESA on schooling related outcomes include Schultz (2004), Behrman, Sengupta and Todd (2005) and de Janvry and Sadoulet (2006) .”
The Impact of Unconditional Cash Transfers on Nutrition: The South African Child Support Grant (2006, result): “In contrast to de Janvry and Sadoulet (2006) who suggest that cash transfers be focussed on older children as a way to maximize school enrollment efiects, these flndings”