Conditional Cash Transfers, Schooling, and Child Labor : Micro-Simulating Brazil's Bolsa Escola Program

By François Bourguignon, Francisco H. G. Ferreira, P. Leite. 2003

347 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A growing number of developing economies are providing cash transfers to poor people that require certain behaviors on their part, such as attending school or regularly visiting health care facilities. A simple ex ante methodology is proposed for evaluating such programs and used to assess the bolsa escola program in Brazil. The results suggest that about 60 percent of poor 10- to 15-year-olds not in school enroll in response to the program. The program reduces the incidence of poverty by only a little more than one percentage point, however, and the Gini coefficient falls just half a point. Results are better for measures more sensitive to the bottom of the distribution, but the effect is never large.

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

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Citations in the corpus

Must Conditional Cash Transfer Programs be Conditioned to be Effective? The Impact of Conditioning Transfers on School Enrollment in Mexico (2011, neutral): “Behrman and Hoddinott, 2005 Bourguignon et al., 2003 Coady et al., 2004a Coady et al., 2004b Schady and Araujo, 2006”
Conditional Cash Transfers, Adult Work Incentives, and Poverty (2006, neutral): “Yet, in a recently published ex-ante micro simulation study of the impact of the Bolsa Escola programme on poverty in Brazil, the income effect of the transfers on adult labour supply is assumed to be negligible (Bourguignon et al, 2003 ).”
Brazil's Bolsa Família: A Double-Edged Sword? (2008, background): “Another investigation into the early Bolsa Escola (School Grant) component when it was implemented in selected municipalities in the 1990s found that it improved school attendance and had a minor but positive impact on poverty levels (Bourguignon et al., 2003).”
Child Schooling and Child Work in the Presence of a Partial Education Subsidy (2017, background): “Most of the empirical evidence on schooling and child labor supports this view (Beegle, Dehejia, and Gatti 2006; Bourguignon, Ferreira, and Leite 2003; Edmonds and Schady 2012; Ferreira, Filmer, and Schady 2009; Manacorda 2006; Ravallion and Wodon 2000; Schady et al. 2008).”
Can conditional cash transfer programs serve as safety nets in keeping children at school and from working when exposed to shocks (2006, methodology): “This role of conditionality in inducing a change in behavior was measured through simulation in estimated school enrollment choices made by children who work in Brazil, allowing to predict the expected impact of Bolsa Escola’s conditional transfers (Bourguignon et al., 2003).”
Cash transfers, conditions, school enrollment, and child work: evidence from a randomized experiment in Ecuador (2006, methodology): “Todd and Wolpin (2003) use data on PROGRESA, and Bourguignon, Ferreira, and Leite (2003) use data on the Brazilian Bolsa Escola program (now renamed Bolsa Familia) to simulate the impact of conditional and unconditional cash transfers; both papers conclude that the bulk of the enrollment effects…”