A growing body of evidence suggests that conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs can have strong, positive effects on a range of welfare indicators for poor households in developing countries. However, there is little evidence about how important each component of these programs is towards achieving these outcomes. This paper contributes to filling this gap by explicitly testing the importance of conditionality on one specific outcome related to human capital formation, school enrollment, using data collected during the evaluation of Mexico's PROGRESA CCT program. We exploit the fact that some PROGRESA beneficiaries who received transfers did not receive the forms needed to monitor the attendance of their children at school. We use a variety of techniques, including propensity score matching, to show that the absence of these forms reduced the likelihood that children attended school with this effect most pronounced when children are transitioning to lower secondary school. We provide substantial evidence that these findings are not driven by unobservable characteristics of households or localities.

Abstract: 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.

The 2011 edition of OECD's periodic economic survey of Mexico. This edition includes chapters on macroeconomic and structural policies, fiscal reform, structural reforms in regulatory, competition and education policies; and informality.

Universal basic income (UBI) is emerging as one of the most hotly debated issues in development and social protection policy. But what are the features of UBI? What is it meant to achieve? How do we know, and what don’t we know, about its performance? What does it take to implement it in practice? Drawing from global evidence, literature, and survey data, this volume provides a framework to elucidate issues and trade-offs in UBI with a view to help inform choices around its appropriateness and feasibility in different contexts. Specifically, the book examines how UBI differs from or complements other social assistance programs in terms of objectives, coverage, incidence, adequacy, incentives, effects on poverty and inequality, financing, political economy, and implementation. It also reviews past and current country experiences, surveys the full range of existing policy proposals, provides original results from micro†“tax benefit simulations, and sets out a range of considerations around the analytics and practice of UBI.

This report presents findings from a study of the economic and food security impacts of the FAO project "Productive safety nets as a tool to reinforce the resilience in the Sahel" (hereinafter referred to as the project/programme Cash+) that took place from April 2015 to February 2017. The project aimed to strengthen the resilience of households vulnerable to shocks and heavily affected by food insecurity and was carried out in two countries: Mali and Mauritania. Unconditional in-cash and in-kind transfers were distributed to the most vulnerable households, which also benefited from other training and technical activities which aimed to strengthen their productive capacity. This report focuses on Mali, where the FAO Cash+ project targeted 36 villages in the Nioro Cercle (“Cercle de Nioro du Sahel”) of Kayes region. Two sets of intervention of equal financial value have been provided to the beneficiaries: i) one called "Cash Only" consisting primarily of a cash transfer and ii) another called "Cash+" associating a cash transfer with distribution of goats, training on good practices of livestock breeding and raising awareness of children's nutrition. The main objective of this report is evaluating the impacts of the FAO’s Cash+ programme in Mali and investigating eventual heterogenous effects of the two types of treatment. Using data collected nine months after the project ended, we analyse its lasting impacts across various livelihood aspects, namely food security, dietary diversity, hygiene practices, food and non-food expenditures, livestock production, non-farm activities, aspirations and expectations.