Conditional cash transfer programmes have been increasingly adopted by several lowand middle-income countries. Despite this overall acceptance, conditionalities remain under scrutiny regarding their possible independent effects on educational and health indicators. This paper is an ecological study of conditionalities in Brazil's Bolsa Família programme. As programme coverage (taken as a proxy of cash transfers) and monitoring and enforcement of the educational conditionalities (proxy of conditionalities) are not correlated at the municipal level, this study fits a number of different ordinary least square (OLS) and growth-curve models to explain variations in drop-out rates and school progression in basic education in public schools across municipalities. ...

This exciting and innovative Handbook provides readers with a comprehensive and globally relevant overview of the instruments, actors and design features of social protection systems, as well as their application and impacts in practice. It is the first book that centres around system building globally, a theme that has gained political importance yet has received relatively little attention in academia.

Conditionality is a key element of conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs and its use has broad political and social appeal. The use of intermediate indicators for ease of implementing conditionality and monitoring (e.g. school enrollment or visits to the clinic) may not fully capture the desired long-term outcomes (e.g. learning achievement or health indicators). The parallel for REDD+ is in choosing between simpler input-based conditionality indicators (e.g. number of trees planted, number of monitoring surveys carried out) or long-term outcome-based indicators (e.g. forest cover maintained, amount of carbon emissions reduced).

"Or, a tale about why it's amazing that governments get so little credit for their many everyday and extraordinary achievements as told by sympathetic observers who seek to create space for a less relentlessly negative view of our pivotal public institutions."

Latin America underwent two major transformations during the 2000s: the widespread election of left-leaning presidents (the so-called left turn) and the diffusion of conditional cash transfer programs (CCTs)—innovative social programs that award regular stipends to poor families on the condition that their children attend school. Combining cross-national quantitative research covering the entire region and in-depth case studies based on field research, Human Capital versus Basic Income: Ideology and Models for Anti-Poverty Programs in Latin America challenges the conventional wisdom that these two transformations were unrelated. In this book, author Fabián A. Borges demonstrates that this ideology greatly influenced both the adoption and design of CCTs. There were two distinct models of CCTs: a “human capital” model based on means-tested targeting and strict enforcement of program conditions, exemplified by the program launched by Mexico’s right, and a more universalistic “basic income” model with more permissive enforcement of conditionality, exemplified by Brazil’s program under Lula. These two models then spread across the region. Whereas right and center governments, with assistance from international financial institutions, enacted CCTs based on the human capital model, the left, with assistance from Brazil, enacted CCTs based on the basic income model. The existence of two distinct types of CCTs and their relation to ideology is supported by quantitative analyses covering the entire region and in-depth case studies based on field research in three countries. Left-wing governments operate CCTs that cover more people and spend more on those programs than their center or right-wing counterparts. Beyond coverage, a subsequent analysis of the 10 national programs adopted after Lula’s embrace of CCTs confirms that program design—evaluated in terms of scope of the target population, strictness of conditionality enforcement, and stipend structure—is shaped by government ideology. This finding is then fleshed out through case studies of the political processes that culminated in the adoption of basic income CCTs by left-wing governments in Argentina and Bolivia and a human capital CCT by a centrist president in Costa Rica.

Vermeersch and Kremer examine the effects of subsidized school meals on school participation, educational achievement, and school finance in a developing country setting. They use data from a program that was implemented in 25 randomly chosen preschools in a pool of 50. Children's school participation was 30 percent higher in the treatment group than in the comparison group. The meals program led to higher curriculum test scores, but only in schools where the teacher was relatively experienced prior to the program. The school meals displaced teaching time and led to larger class sizes. Despite improved incentives, teacher absenteeism remained at a high level of 30 percent. Treatment schools raised their fees, and comparison schools close to treatment schools decreased their fees. Some of the price effects are caused by a combination of capacity constraints and pupil transfers that would not happen if the school meals were ordered in all schools. The intention-to-treat estimator of the effect of the randomized program incorporates those price effects, and therefore it should be considered a lower bound on the effect of generalized school meals. This insight on price effects generalizes to other randomized program evaluations. This paper--a product of the Poverty Reduction and Economic Management 2, Africa Technical Families--is part of a larger effort in the region to increase our understanding of the impact of programs aimed at reaching the Millennium Development Goals.

The twenty-one contributions in this book assess the controversy surrounding the Fund and provide judgments about the criteria for Fund lending which should help readers understand and analyze both its ongoing role in smoothing adjustment to international payments imbalances and its currently critical position in responding to the debt crisis.