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  • 1
    UID:
    almafu_9958121528802883
    Format: 1 online resource (38 pages)
    Series Statement: Policy research working papers.
    Content: Under some conditions, macroeconomic crises can have a positive effect on the accumulation of human capital because they reduce the opportunity cost of schooling. This has profound implications for the design of appropriate social protection policies. The impact of macroeconomic crises on parents' investments in the human capital of their children is a widely contested issue. Schady analyzes the effects of the profound macroeconomic crisis in Peru in 1988-92 on the schooling and employment decisions made by urban school-age children. He arrives at two basic findings: First, the crisis had no effect on the attendance rates of school-age children. But the share of children who were both employed and in school fell significantly during the crisis; Second, mean educational attainment was significantly higher for children who were exposed to the crisis than for those who were not. Schady argues that these findings may be related: children who are not employed have more time available and may therefore put more effort into school. He concludes with a discussion of the implications of his findings for the design of appropriate social protection policies. This paper-a product of the Poverty Sector Unit, Latin America and the Caribbean Region-is part of a larger effort in the region to understand the effects of macroeconomic crises on households, and to design appropriate policies to mitigate their costs.
    Language: English
    URL: Volltext  (URL des Erstveröffentlichers)
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  • 2
    UID:
    almafu_9958094653802883
    Format: 1 online resource (36 pages)
    Series Statement: Policy research working papers.
    Content: A revised version was published as The Political Economy of Expenditures by the Peruvian Social Fund (FONCODES), 1991-95. American Political Science Review 94 (2, June): 289-304, 2000. As the literature on political influences on the allocation of discretionary funds predicts, spending by the Peruvian Social Fund, FONCODES, increased significantly before elections. FONCODES projects were also directed at provinces where the marginal political impact of expenditures was likely to be greatest. President Alberto Fujimori created the Peruvian Social Fund (FONCODES) in 1991 with the stated objectives of generating employment, helping to alleviate poverty, and improving access to social services. Schady uses province-level data on monthly expenditures, socioeconomic indicators, and electoral outcomes to analyze political influences on the timing and geographic distribution of FONCODES expenditures between 1991 and 1995. He finds that: FONCODES expenditures increased significantly before elections; FONCODES projects were directed at poor provinces, as well as provinces in which the marginal political impact of expenditures was likely to be greatest; The results are robust to many specifications and controls. The Peruvian data thus support predictions made in the literature on political business cycles as well as the literature on political influences on the allocation of discretionary funds. This paper - a product of the Poverty Division, Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network - is part of a larger effort in the network to understand the functioning and impact of social funds.
    Language: English
    URL: Volltext  (URL des Erstveröffentlichers)
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  • 3
    UID:
    almafu_9958074877902883
    Format: 1 online resource (53 pages)
    Series Statement: Policy research working papers.
    Content: The authors examine how a government-run cash transfer program targeted to poor mothers in rural Ecuador influenced the health and development of their children. This program is of particular interest because, unlike other transfer programs that have been implemented recently in Latin America, receipt of the cash transfers was not conditioned on specific parental actions, such as taking children to health clinics or sending them to school. This feature of the program makes it possible to assess whether conditionality is necessary for programs to have beneficial effects on children. The authors use random assignment at the parish level to identify the program's effects. They find that the cash transfer program had positive effects on the physical, cognitive, and socioemotional development of children, and the treatment effects were substantially larger for the poorer children than for less poor children. Among the poorest children in the sample, those whose mothers were eligible for transfers had outcomes that were on average more than 20 percent of a standard deviation higher than those for comparable children in the control group. Treatment effects are somewhat larger for girls and for children with more highly-educated mothers. The authors examine three mechanisms-better nutrition, greater use of health care, and better parenting-through which the transfers might influence child development. The program appeared to improve children's nutrition and increased the chance they were treated for helminth infections. But children in the treatment group were not more likely to visit health clinics for growth monitoring, and the mental health and parenting of their mothers did not improve.
    Language: English
    URL: Volltext  (URL des Erstveröffentlichers)
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  • 4
    UID:
    almafu_9958246568602883
    Format: 1 online resource (26 pages)
    Series Statement: Policy research working papers.
    Content: Research from the United States shows that gaps in early cognitive and noncognitive abilities appear early in the life cycle. Little is known about this important question for developing countries. This paper provides new evidence of sharp differences in cognitive development by socioeconomic status in early childhood for five Latin American countries. To help with comparability, the paper uses the same measure of receptive language ability for all five countries. It finds important differences in development in early childhood across countries, and steep socioeconomic gradients within every country. For the three countries where panel data to follow children over time exists, there are few substantive changes in scores once children enter school. These results are robust to different ways of defining socioeconomic status, to different ways of standardizing outcomes, and to selective non-response on the measure of cognitive development.
    Language: English
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
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  • 5
    UID:
    almafu_9958094639802883
    Format: 1 online resource (40 pages)
    Series Statement: Policy research working papers.
    Content: A revised version was published as The Allocation and Impact of Social Funds: Spending on School Infrastructure in Peru (with Christina Paxson). World Bank Economic Review 16 (2): 297-319, 2002. Education projects of the Peruvian Social Fund (FONCODES) have reached poor districts and, to the extent they live in those districts, poor households. FONCODES has had a positive effect on school attendance rates for young children, but not on the likelihood that children will be at an appropriate school level for their age. Since its creation in 1991, the Peruvian Social Fund (FONCODES) has spent about USD 570 million funding microprojects throughout Peru. Many of these projects have involved building and renovating school facilities. Paxson and Schady analyze the targeting and impact of FONCODES investments in the education sector, using data from FONCODES, Peru's 1993 population census, Peru's 1994 and 1995 Living Standards Measurement Surveys, and a 1996 household survey conducted by the Peruvian Statistical Institute. They present their results based on various descriptive and econometric techniques, including nonparametric regressions, differences-in-differences, and instrumental variables estimators. They show that FONCODES projects in the education sector have reached poor districts and, to the extent they live in those districts, poor households. FONCODES has had a positive effect on school attendance rates for young children, but not on the likelihood that children will be at an appropriate school level for their age. Among other recommendations, they suggest that FONCODES consider random assignment of some education projects for a subsample of the population, to test the robustness of the study's assumptions and results. Lack of disaggregated data on such measures as the time children spend in school, pupil-teacher ratios, and scholastic achievement precluded analysis of the impact of FONCODES education projects on school quality. Collecting such data, and understanding how improvements in school infrastructure interact with other school-level changes to produce more learning, should be a research priority. This paper - a product of the Poverty Division, Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network - is part of a larger effort in the network to understand the functioning and impact of social funds.
    Language: English
    URL: Volltext  (URL des Erstveröffentlichers)
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  • 6
    UID:
    almafu_9958112276302883
    Format: 1 online resource (22 pages)
    Series Statement: Policy research working papers.
    Content: There is increasing evidence that conditional cash transfer programs can have large impacts on school enrollment, including in very poor countries. However, little is known about which features of program design - including the amount of the cash that is transferred, how frequently conditions are monitored, whether non-complying households are penalized, and the identity or gender of the cash recipients - account for the observed outcomes. This paper analyzes the impact of one feature of program design - namely, the magnitude of the transfer. The analysis uses data from a program in Cambodia that deliberately altered the transfer amounts received by otherwise comparable households. The findings show clear evidence of diminishing marginal returns to transfer size despite the fact that even the larger transfers represented on average only 3 percent of the consumption of the median recipient households. If applicable to other settings, these results have important implications for other programs that transfer cash with the explicit aim of increasing school enrollment levels in developing countries.
    Language: English
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
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  • 7
    UID:
    almafu_9958097421402883
    Format: 1 online resource (26 pages)
    Series Statement: Policy research working papers.
    Content: This paper presents evidence about the impact on school enrollment of a program in Ecuador that gives cash transfers to the 40 percent poorest families. The evaluation design consists of a randomized experiment for families around the first quintile of the poverty index and of a regression discontinuity design for families around the second quintile of this index, which is the program's eligibility threshold. This allows us to compare results from two different credible identification methods, and to investigate whether the impact varies with families' poverty level. Around the first quintile of the poverty index the impact is positive while it is equal to zero around the second quintile. This suggests that for the poorest families the program lifts a credit constraint while this is not the case for families close to the eligibility threshold.
    Language: English
    URL: Volltext  (URL des Erstveröffentlichers)
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  • 8
    UID:
    almafu_9958062357302883
    Format: 1 online resource (47 pages)
    Series Statement: Policy research working papers.
    Content: The diffusion of cost-effective life saving technologies has reduced infant mortality in much of the developing world. Income gains may also play a direct, protective role in ensuring child survival, although the empirical findings to date on this issue have been mixed. This paper assembles data from Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) in 59 countries to analyze the relationship between changes in per capita GDP and infant mortality. The authors show that there is a strong, negative association between changes in per capita GDP and infant mortality- in a first-differenced specification the implied elasticity of infant mortality with respect to per capita GDP is approximately -0.56. In addition to this central result, two findings are noteworthy. First, although there is some evidence of changes in the composition of women giving birth during economic upturns and downturns, the observed changes in infant mortality are not a result of mothers with protective characteristics timing fertility to correspond with the business cycle. Second, the association between infant mortality and per capita GDP is particularly pronounced for periods of large contractions in GDP, suggesting the inability of developing country households or health systems (or both) to smooth resources. Simple back-of-the-envelope calculations using the estimates suggest that there may have been more than 1 million "excess" deaths in the developing world since 1980 as a result of large, negative contractions in per capita GDP.
    Language: English
    URL: Volltext  (URL des Erstveröffentlichers)
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  • 9
    UID:
    almafu_9958062375602883
    Format: 1 online resource (32 pages)
    Series Statement: Policy research working papers.
    Content: How cash transfers made to women are used has important implications for models of household behavior and for the design of social programs. In this paper, the authors use the randomized introduction of an unconditional cash transfer to poor women in rural Ecuador to analyze the effect of transfers on the food Engel curve. There are two main findings. First, the authors show that households randomly assigned to receive Bono de Desarrollo Humano (BDH) transfers have a significantly higher food share in expenditures than those that were randomly assigned to the control group. Second, they show that the rising food share among BDH beneficiaries is found among households that have both adult males and females, but not among households that only have adult females. Bargaining power between men and women is likely to be important in mixed-adult households, but not among female-only households, where there are no men to bargain with. Finally, the authors show that within mixed-adult households, program effects are only significant in households in which the initial bargaining capacity of women was likely to be weak. This pattern of results is consistent with an increase in the bargaining power of women in households that received BDH transfers.
    Language: English
    URL: Volltext  (URL des Erstveröffentlichers)
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  • 10
    UID:
    almafu_9958112276002883
    Format: 1 online resource (41 pages)
    Series Statement: Policy research working papers.
    Content: Conditional cash transfers have been adopted by a large number of countries in the past decade. Although the impacts of these programs have been studied extensively, understanding of the economic mechanisms through which cash and conditions affect household decisions remains incomplete. This paper uses evidence from a program in Cambodia, where eligibility varied substantially among siblings in the same household, to illustrate these effects. A model of schooling decisions highlights three different effects of a child-specific conditional cash transfer: an income effect, a substitution effect, and a displacement effect. The model predicts that such a conditional cash transfer will increase enrollment for eligible children - due to all three effects - but have an ambiguous effect on ineligible siblings. The ambiguity arises from the interaction of a positive income effect with a negative displacement effect. These predictions are shown to be consistent with evidence from Cambodia, where the child-specific program makes modest transfers, conditional on school enrollment for children of middle-school age. Scholarship recipients were more than 20 percentage points more likely to be enrolled in school and 10 percentage points less likely to work for pay. However, the school enrollment and work of ineligible siblings was largely unaffected by the program.
    Language: English
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