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Climate change threatens the well-being of millions of people in Latin America and the Caribbean. The region is experiencing an increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events and disasters, which disproportionately affect the poorest and most vulnerable groups. Moreover, the accelerated degradation of terrestrial, marine, and coastal ecosystems endangers the livelihoods of millions of people. Consequently, the implementation of mitigation policies to curb the advancement of climate change, such as the elimination of energy subsidies and the reconversion of polluting industries, can have far-reaching implications for household income and consumption levels. This paper analyzes the contributions that social protection systems can make to the climate agenda, as well as the key gaps and challenges that must be addressed to effectively respond to these emerging threats.

Monthly cash transfers delivered to vulnerable middle-income households in Colombia increase per capita income, but the effects on spending appear small and related to nonfood spending. Cash transfers have a large impact when beneficiary households experience severe economic shocks, suggesting lack of insurance as a major constraint affecting non-poor but vulnerable households. By encouraging the adoption of digital saving accounts, the program also increased access to formal credit.

Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) is one of the regions most exposed and vulnerable to climate-related risks, with large shocks occurring regularly. Climate change is exacerbating the frequency and variability of climate related extremes and increasing slow onset events, threatening social and economic outcomes in the region. Responding to climate change will require stronger risk management systems that include social protection. Social protection systems in LAC are relatively advanced, but they do not yet consider climate shocks. Overall, social protection systems suffer from relatively low coverage, leaving significant parts of the population vulnerable to transient and chronic poverty in the face of shocks. The large social protection responses that LAC implemented to address the impacts of COVID-19 present an opportunity to prepare for the challenges arising from increased climate-related shocks. This study investigates how non-contributory social protection (mainly income support) has been used to respond to previous climate-related shocks and to COVID-19, and what are the implications for managing climate-related shocks in the future.

One reason carbon prices are difficult to implement is that they might imply high additional costs on poor and vulnerable households. In response, studies often highlight that recycling revenues through cash transfers can render carbon pricing reforms progressive. This neglects that existing cash transfer programs target households from low-income groups often imperfectly and that impacts of a carbon price are heterogeneous within income groups. In this study we analyze the role of existing cash transfer schemes to alleviate distributional effects of carbon pricing in 16 Latin American and Caribbean countries. We find carbon pricing to be regressive in 11 countries, progressive in 5, and show that differences within income groups exceed differences between them. Beyond total household expenditures, car ownership and cooking fuel explain the variance in carbon pricing impacts. We show that households who are most affected by carbon pricing, some of them poor, do not necessarily have access to existing cash transfer programs. Governments aiming to compensate households may broaden coverage of existing cash transfer programs or consider complementing instruments such as in-kind transfers or removing existing distortionary taxes.

We exploit an expansion in social protection to middle-income households to provide evidence on how middle-income households cope with economic shocks and how to build their resilience. We use a regression discontinuity design around the eligibility cutoff for a program that delivered monthly cash transfers mainly through bank accounts in Colombia. We find no impacts on food security, education, and health outcomes--the target outcomes of antipoverty programs. In contrast, program eligibility increases non-food consumption and reduces debt for routine expenses. Bank account ownership increases by 16%, and beneficiaries are more likely to borrow from formal lenders. Amid systemic and idiosyncratic shocks, the program prevents middle-income households from reducing non-food spending and acquiring debt for routine expenses. Moreover, when hit by severe shocks, beneficiary households substitute away from predatory loans. The results suggest that middle-income households are constrained by lack of insurance and that social protection can build middle-income households' resilience to shocks through both cash transfers and by integrating beneficiaries into formal credit markets.

Covering the full population of applicants to the Jamaican Conditional Cash Transfer Program (PATH), we explore whether receiving PATH benefits alters the academic returns to subsequently attending a more preferred public secondary school. To uncover causal associations, we exploit exogenous variation arising from both the PATH eligibility criteria and the centralized allocation process to public secondary schools within a double regression discontinuity design. Among girls, receiving PATH benefits before secondary school enrollment does not influence the academic gains from attending a more selective school. However, boys exposed to PATH experience significantly lower returns to subsequently attending a more selective school with respect to comparable peers who did not receive PATH. These results highlight the relevance of considering both the direct effects of conditional cash transfers and the potential indirect effects that such policies could convey through altering the effectiveness of other related policies.

In 1997, the Mexican government designed the conditional cash transfer program Progresa, which became the worldwide model of a new approach to social programs, simultaneously targeting human capital accumulation and poverty reduction. A large literature has documented the short and medium-term impacts of the Mexican program and its successors in other countries. Using Progresas experimental evaluation design originally rolled out in 1997-2000, and a tracking survey conducted 20 years later, this paper studies the differential long-term impacts of exposure to Progresa. We focus on two cohorts of children: i) those that during the period of differential exposure were in-utero or in the first years of life, and ii) those who during the period of differential exposure were transitioning from primary to secondary school. Results for the early childhood cohort, 18-20-year-old at endline, shows that differential exposure to Progresa during the early years led to positive impacts on educational attainment and labor income expectations. This constitutes unique long-term evidence on the returns of an at-scale intervention on investments in human capital during the first 1000 days of life. Results for the school cohort - in their early 30s at endline - show that the short-term impacts of differential exposure to Progresa on schooling were sustained in the long-run and manifested themselves in larger labor incomes, more geographical mobility including through international migration, and later family formation.

The socioeconomic crisis associated with the pandemic put cash transfer programs back at the top of the policy agenda. It showed that the Latin American and Caribbean regions income support systems were both fundamental and insufficient. In this paper, we present novel estimates of the coverage and beneficiary distribution of all non-contributory cash transfers both before and during the COVID-19 crisis. The former is useful to show the degree of preparedness of the region. The latter analyzes the magnitude of the policy response. While the literature presents estimates of coverage and leakage of conditional cash transfers and non-contributory pensions, our results are novel because they are the first to analyze coverage and leakage implemented in response to the COVID-19 crisis. In addition, we are the first to expand the focus to all non-contributory cash transfer programs, including those that are quasi-universal and/or unconditional. This is the most appropriate focus when the goal is to assess the ability to provide protection to larger population groups (including the vulnerable) and against transitory poverty caused by systemic shocks (such as pandemic or extreme weather events, which may become more and more frequent due to climate change). Using data from the Inter-American Development Bank “Harmonized Household Surveys from Latin America and the Caribbean”, which now provide a more comprehensive coverage of Caribbean countries, we show that before the pandemic non-contributory cash transfers covered 26% of the population of 17 countries with available data. Average coverage of the extreme poor, moderate poor and vulnerable population was 56%, 43% and 28% respectively. During the crisis, LAC governments implemented 111 new cash transfer interventions, increasing coverage to 34% of the population in 12 countries with available data. Average coverage increased among the moderate poor (50%) and vulnerable population (37%), while it remained unvaried amongst th

Starting in 2006, Bolivia implemented a non-targeted, nationwide conditional cash transfer program that delivered transfers to households of school-age children conditional on attendance. The program increased the probability of working and the number of weekly work hours among parents of eligible children, mainly in areas with limited access to formal financial services. The program allowed mothers of eligible children to work more as they used the transfers to start or scale up small businesses. In turn, as mothers entered the labor force, overworked fathers were able to work fewer hours.

Decreases in labor supply among cash-aid recipients are often cited as potential drawbacks of cash-transfer programs. In developing countries, such concern might be misplaced: This paper documents increases in labor supply due to a cash-transfer program. Using variation across cohorts and over time in the eligibility criteria of a nationwide conditional cash transfer program in Bolivian public schools, difference-in-differences estimates show that the probability of working increases by 4 percentage points in the case of adult females from households of eligible children. The results are unlikely to be explained by a relief of time constraints for adult females, as the results are driven by mothers whose children would have attended to school in absence of the program. Instead, this paper finds increases in self-employment and that the increases in labor supply are mostly driven by females from areas with limited access to financial services. The results suggest that cash transfer programs may relax liquidity constraints and may boost entrepreneurship among adult females.

A conditional cash transfer program in the Dominican Republic offered an opportunity to randomize the entry of 61 firms into 72 markets and study the effects of increased competition on prices and service quality for the beneficiaries of the program. Six months after the intervention, entry into the market led to reductions in prices and an improvement of self-reported service quality among consumers. Prices dropped more in areas where the number of entrants was larger. Competition seems to have driven part of the clientele away from incumbent retailers.

Carbon taxes are advocated as efficient fiscal and environmental policies, but they have proven difficult to implement. One reason is that carbon taxes can aggravate poverty by increasing prices of basic goods and services such as food, heating, and commuting. Meanwhile, cash transfer programs have been established as some of the most efficient poverty-reducing policies used in developing countries. Here, we quantify how governments can mitigate negative social consequences of carbon taxes by expanding the beneficiary base or the amounts disbursed with existing cash transfer programs. We focus on Latin America and the Caribbean, a region that has pioneered cash transfer programs, which aspires to contribute to climate mitigation, and faces inequality. We find that 30% of carbon revenues could suffice to compensate poor and vulnerable households on average, leaving 70% to fund other political priorities. We also quantify tradeoffs for governments choosing who and how much to compensate.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, millions of low-income women, receive small, periodic government payments, including Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs). It has been estimated that 1 out of 4 families in the region receive some government support. For these women, many of them self-employed, or dependent on subsistence jobs, liquidity management and good financial planning, for example being able to save for a purpose, as opposing to spending the subsidies as soon as they are paid, becomes essential reduce vulnerability, and grow financially, including affording larger household and business needs. In this case study we ask ourselves: Do women that receive CCT´s have demand for liquid and planned savings products, if adapted to their needs? And if so, how can financial institutions develop sustainable business models to scale up those products? These are the questions that this case study wants to answer by examining the results of the ProSavings program, that provided support the design and/or adaptation of liquid and planned savings to the needs and preferences of the low-income population in 8 projects: Belize, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, México and Perú. As a result of these projects, more than 230,000 low income people have opened savings accounts, almost half of them for the first time. The case study includes recommendations to develop successful business strategies to increase the number low income women savings, such as features for liquid and planned savings products, marketing and channel strategies, and financial education.

Conditional cash transfer programs have become a popular social protection tool in developing countries. They aim to reduce short-term poverty through cash transfers and long-term poverty through enhancing investments in human capital. While numerous evaluations of CCTs show positive short-term impacts, there is limited evidence on whether these benefits translate into sustained long-term gains. This paper uses the municipal-level randomized assignment of a 5-year CCT program in Honduras to estimate long-term effects 13 years after program start on a wide set cohorts who benefitted from the program either during early childhood or at school-going ages. We estimate ITT effects using individual-level data from the population census, which allows assignment of individuals to their municipality of birth circumventing usual selection concerns. Results show significant increases in grade attainment for different cohorts of non-indigenous girls and boys. This is reflected in increases in secondary school completion rates and the probability of reaching university studies with more then 50 percent for those exposed at school-going ages. Educational gains are much more limited for indigenous children, though grades attained increases significantly for some cohorts of indigenous girls. Finally exposure to the CCT more than doubles the probability of international migration of young men, from 3 to 7 percentage points.

We explore the effects of a randomly assigned conditional cash transfer in Honduras (Bono 10000) on early childhood development. We find significant impacts on cognitive development in children 0-60 months, with an average effect size of 0.13 SD. We show differential impacts by type of transfer: 0-5-year-old children from families receiving the “health” transfer, which targeted families with 0-5-year-old children only, benefited significantly from the program, whereas 0-5 year-olds in families receiving the “education” transfer, which targeted 6-18 year-olds, perceived no benefit. In comparison with other programs, the effect of this impact is sizeable (0.34 SD on average). Although the overall program appears to have slightly changed some behaviors that might affect children (i.e. decreased probability of maternal employment, and increased maternal self-esteem), we did not find heterogenous impacts of the Bono across these variables. Results are explained mainly by differences in conditions: while the “education” component imposed conditions only on children of schooling age, the “health” transfer required regular health checkups of 0-5 year old children. The “health” transfer families were more likely to attend health checkups, which may have induced behavior changes that improved children’s health and cognitive development, including purchasing more nutritious food. These results imply that cash without well-targeted conditions attached, might not be as effective for the development of young children.

Many developing countries offer cash to low-income families to encourage children to attend school. These initiatives have increased educational attainment, but they have rarely improved student achievement. One potential reason may be that beneficiaries may need additional support to develop the requisite “soft” skills to succeed in school. We conducted a three-year randomized evaluation of a program that provides secondary school students with scholarships and non-academic mentoring in the Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The program improved students’ academic behaviors (e.g., starting to study early before an exam or catching up on schoolwork missed due to absences). Yet, we find little evidence that it improved their academic mindsets (e.g., self-beliefs about performance and efficacy), perseverance (e.g., grit), or learning strategies (e.g., metacognition). The program also improved some metrics of school performance (e.g., language grades, student absenteeism, grade failure, and the number of failed subjects) on its first year, but we cannot detect similar gains in subsequent years. This fadeout may be due to the fact that a large share of treatment students were expelled from the program for not meeting its requirements. We do not find any evidence that the program improved students’ achievement in math and reading or their personality traits.

Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs are important anti-poverty programs in Latin America and the Caribbean. There is little evidence, however, of the effectiveness of ongoing CCT programs several years after they have begun. Such evidence is particularly relevant for policymakers because program effects may become larger, as with the operational cycle, or smaller, if enthusiasm on the part of the beneficiaries or the program team wanes. We analyze whether children exposed since birth to a CCT in El Salvador have better outcomes at initial school ages. As such, we capture the cumulative effects of the CCT during early childhood, combined with the current effects of the CCT transfers and conditionalities.Our results show exposure significantly increased school enrollment and early attainment for five-year olds, with smaller effects for six-year-olds. Families of the latter experienced a significant improvement as measured by a wealth index. The pattern of impacts suggests continued program exposure might be improving school readiness or shifting norms around child investment.

Twenty years have passed since conditional cash transfer programs were first implemented in Latin America and the Caribbean. This book takes the opportunity to critically review the design options and operational solutions employed by the countries in the region, with the goal of systematizing this accumulated operational knowledge and identifying both good practices and remaining challenges. It addresses the major processes of the operational cycle: beneficiary identification and management of the rosters of beneficiaries, verification of conditionalities, and payment of transfers. In addition, it discusses cross-cutting issues, such as territorial organization, management information systems, and the linkage of beneficiaries to other social programs. This book is a useful and practical tool for those seeking to understand how transfer programs work and how they can be improved by building on the experiences of other countries.

Many poor households in developing countries are liquidity-constrained. As a result, they may under-invest in the human capital of their children. We provide new evidence on the long-term (10-year) effects of cash transfers using data from Ecuador. Our analysis is based on two separate sources of data and two identification strategies. First, we extend the results from an experiment that randomly assigned children under the age of 6 years to early or late treatment groups. Although the early treatment group received twice as much in total transfers, we find no difference between children in the two groups on performance on a large number of tests. Second, we use a regression discontinuity design exploiting the fact that a poverty index was used to determine eligibility for transfers. We focus on children who were just-eligible and just-ineligible for transfers when they were in late childhood, and compare their school attainment and work status 10 years later. Transfers increased secondary school completion, but the effects are small, between 1 and 2 percentage points from a counterfactual school completion rate of 75 percent. We conclude that any effect of cash transfers on the inter-generational transmission of poverty in Ecuador is likely to be modest.

While the effects of conditional cash transfers on primary school enrollment, attendance and dropouts are well documented, few studies address their impact on longer-term outcomes like high-school graduation. The literature is even scarcer regarding how changes in the amount of school grants affect educational outcomes, particularly in middle and high school, where dropout rates are much higher. This study will address the effects of increased cash grants on high school graduation rates in the context of urban Mexico. Starting in 2009, new beneficiary families in the Oportunidades conditional cash transfer program received an alternative transfer scheme in 263 urban localities, eliminating school grants for primary school and increasing the grant amount in middle and high school by 25 percent. Using administrative data sources and a difference-in-difference identification strategy, we will analyze the effects on dropout rates and high-school graduation rates.

We explored the hypothesis that the Programme of Advancement through Health and Education (PATH), Jamaica's conditional cash transfer program, contributes to breaking the inter-generational poverty cycle by placing its urban beneficiaries on a higher educational trajectory. Using a regression discontinuity design, we found that PATH urban male beneficiaries who sat the Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT) over the period 2010-2014 performed better on the test (scoring 16.03 points, or 3.6%, higher than non-beneficiaries); consequently, they were placed in better secondary schools (1.5 percentiles higher in a national school ranking based on placed students' GSAT scores). In contrast, we found no significant impact for urban girls.

The Avancemos conditional cash transfer (CCT) program, which has operated since 2006 in Costa Rica, focuses on families living in extreme poverty and social vulnerability with adolescents and youth between the ages of 12 and 25. In August 2015, nearly 157,000 students received the cash transfer upon meeting certain co-responsibilities associated with school attendance and completing the school year in secondary school. Beneficiaries are eligible based on their score in the Target Population Information System (Sistema de Población Objetivo - SIPO), calculated through the Social Information Record (Ficha de Información Social - FIS). To receive the benefit, the mother or guardian of the student needs to sign a contract with the Joint Institute for Social Welfare (Instituto Mixto de Ayuda Social - IMAS) in which they commit to meeting the abovementioned co-responsibilities. Verification of the co-responsibilities is carried out by the IMAS in conjunction with the education centers. The payments are made monthly through a prepaid card issued by the National Bank of Costa Rica (Banco Nacional de Costa Rica - BNCR). This document is part of a series of studies carried out in several countries of Latin America and the Caribbean with the objective of systematizing understanding of the operations of CCTs. The other case studies are available on the IDB´s Conditional Cash Transfers website.

The Social Inclusion Program PROSPERA is the Mexico's conditional cash transfer (CCT) program, launched in 2014 after its predecessors: the Program for Human Development Oportunidades, and the Program for Education, Health, and Nutrition (Progresa), which entered into force in 2002 and 1997, respectively. In order to determine the eligibility of the households, a proxy means test is applied, based on the data gathered through the Survey of Socio-Economic and Demographic Characteristics of Households (Encuesta de Características Socioeconómicas y Demográficas de los Hogares - ENCASEH), which is answered by a responsible person in the household. Once the families have been accepted in the program, they must comply with their health and education-related co-responsibilities, which compliance is checked once every two months. In order to carry out these actions, the Prospera National Coordination Office (Coordinación Nacional de Prospera), which is in charge of managing the program, and the Secretariats of Public Education and Health allow the certification of compliance with education and healthcare-related actions, as well as the delivery of benefits on a two-month period basis through the payment points. By the end of 2014, 6,129,125 households were receiving benefits from the program. This document is part of a series of studies carried out in several countries of Latin America and the Caribbean with the objective of systematizing understanding of the operations of CCTs. The other case studies are available on the IDB´s Conditional Cash Transfers website.

We review the literature on the long-term impacts of Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs in Latin America. Long-term impacts are defined as those that both: 1) are related to the accumulation of human capital, and; 2) are observed after beneficiary children have reached a later stage of the life-cycle. We focus on two life-cycle transitions. The first is children exposed to CCTs in utero or early childhood, who have then transitioned to school ages. The second is children exposed to CCTs during school ages, who have then transitioned to early adulthood. The evidence is inconclusive. The experimental literature finds consistent positive long-term effects on schooling, as well as some positive impacts on cognitive skills and learning, socioemotional skills and off-farm employment and income. However, many other estimates are not statistically different from zero and it is often not possible to discern whether this is due to lack of impact or to methodological shortcomings in theevaluation studies. Non-experimental evidence also is mixed. Developing further opportunities for analyses with rigorous identification strategies for the measurement of long-term impacts should be high on the research agenda. As original beneficiaries continue to age, this should also be increasingly possible.

Using administrative data from the urban Mexican Oportunidades program, this paper analyzes why poor households choose less education for their children, even when offered financial compensation for school attendance. Each school year, half of recipients forgo income for which they are eligible by failing to send children to school. Using a random effects probit and fractional response model, the analysis provides strong evidence that the poorest households, those with more dependents and high school students, recipients with limited education, and those living in large urban areas are less likely to have their children attend school and thus receive partial payments.

This paper analyzes the change in poverty between 2002 and 2013 in Colombia. We find that more than 90 percent of the reduction in poverty is explained by economic growth, and that wages are the main household income contributing to poverty reduction. In particular, 71% and 85% of poverty reduction comes from labor income in urban and rural areas, respectively. Cash transfers also played an important role in reducing poverty and inequality. Our estimates suggest that without cash transfers, poverty would have been 4 percentage points higher in 2013 and the income distribution would have been worse. The paper also finds that increases in labor income have been driven by a growing proportion of populationacquiring skills at technical and professional level. However, when we focus on the poor population, increases in their labor incomes are not explained by higher educational levels, but by higher market wage levels.

This document presents a summary of the Comparative Case Study: Review of IDB Institutional Support to the Conditional Cash Transfer in Three Lower-Middle-Income Countries developed by the Office of Evaluation and Oversight at the Inter-American Development Bank.

Bolsa Familia (PBF) is a conditional cash transfer program (CCT) focused on health and education that has been implemented by the federal government of Brazil since 2003. The Ministry for Social Development and to Combat Hunger (MDS) is responsible for the program, defines the eligibility criteria and authorizes payments to families. Some of the principal characteristics of this program are its focus on families as beneficiaries (those with monthly per capita incomes lower than R$154.00), variable benefits according to the family composition that prioritize children and adolescents, direct payment through a bank card, access to the program throughout a unified mechanism (Cadastro Unico), shared management responsibilities with states and municipalities, and the administration of quotas by municipality using an estimate of poor families developed in partnership with the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). In June 2015, PBF supported 13,827,369 families who on average received payments of R$167.15. With a budget equivalent to 0.5% of the gross domestic product, PBF helped reduce the infant mortality rate caused by undernourishment and diarrhea by more than 50%. The program also increased the passing rate of students in secondary education from 75.7% to 79.7%. This document is part of a series of studies in several countries in Latin America and the Caribbean that aims to systematize knowledge about CCT operations.

This document is part of the comparative evaluations developed by the Office of Evaluation and Oversight on projects financed by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). This evaluation analyzes the support provided by the IDB for the implementation of conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs in three lower-middle-income countries.The relevance of this evaluation is twofold. First, most of the IDB¿s loan and technical cooperation operations supporting CCT programs have funded programs in middle-income countries. As a consequence, both knowledge and documents from CCT programs supported by the IDB generally refer to countries whose education and health systems are more developed. This evaluation is intended to provide more evidence on the implementation of CCT programs in lower-middle-income countries. Second, the successful implementation of CCT programs requires a high degree of institutional capacity and alignment among different critical actors. Scholars have recently questioned the relevance of CCT programs in low-income countries, given the complexity of their institutional design and, in some cases, the countries¿ poor basic service provision. This evaluation examines these concerns for the selected programs.

We present novel estimates of the quality of targeting of conditional cash transfer (CCT) and non-contributory pension (NCP) programs in Latin-America and the Caribbean. Our contribution is novel in that we use both national and international poverty lines, provide differentiated estimates for urban and rural areas, and compare CCT and NCP programs. We show that leakage to the non-poor coexists with pervasive under-coverage of all poor, including the extreme poor. On average, CCTs cover only 50.6 percent of the extreme poor in households with children under 18 years of age. Similarly, NCPs cover only 53.2 percent of the extreme poor in households with elderly members who do not receive a contributory pension. At the same time, 39.2 percent of CCT beneficiaries and 48.6 percent of NCP beneficiaries are not poor, highlighting the potential need for retargeting and recertification. In most countries, retargeting could produce a substantial double benefit in terms of poverty reduction and fiscal savings.

This monograph reviews the processes used by conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) to recertify beneficiaries for services or classify them as ready to leave the programs. Most countries have attempted recertification to identify beneficiaries who are no longer poor and/or to increase the efficiency of the program when a new targeting mechanism is developed. Until recently however, in part because of high political costs, recertification has been slow and only sometimes followed by program exit. Brazil represents an exception, as all beneficiaries must be recertified every two years as a condition for remaining in the program, and municipalities receive financial incentives to support timely recertification. Many countries that have introduced income-generating initiatives to promote both wage employment and self-employment among CCT recipients have placed participants¿ overcoming poverty high on the policy agenda. However, there are no rigorous impact evaluations on the effectiveness of these initiatives, which in any case have only reached a negligible share of CCT beneficiaries. We review the experience of welfare-to-work reforms in high-income countries and extract some lessons that may be useful for LAC countries implementing a CCT.

Más Familias en Acción (MFA) is a conditional cash transfer (CCT) program that has operated in Colombia since 2000. Currently, 2.7 million families receive benefits associated with school attendance and health controls. MFA’s target populationcomprises poor families that have either been displaced by the conflict or are from indigenous communities, and have family members who are under 18 years old. Beneficiaries are identified through the Beneficiary Identification System for Social Programs (SISBEN) to measure standards of living; as well as official records of families who have been displaced by the conflict, indigenous communities, and Red Unidos. In 2013, when the third version of SISBEN was introduced, all families identified as potential beneficiaries had to enroll with MFA, regardless of whether or not they had been beneficiaries before. Over the past few years, MFA has adopted information technologies to improve the efficiency of its operational processes and reduce families’ participation costs. Nowadays, most healthcare and education institutions record information about compliance with co-responsibilities in the SIFA information system. Moreover, most payments are made through bank accounts, and beneficiaries can conduct transactions using ATMs, point-of-sale (POS) terminals in several commercial establishments, and their mobile phones. This document is part of a series of studies carried out in several countries of Latin America and the Caribbean with the objective of systematizing understanding of the operations of CCTs. The other case studies are available on the IDB´s Conditional Cash Transfers website.

This paper provides evidence of the long-term relationship between male-to-female spousal violence and the Oportunidades conditional cash transfer program. It uses data from three nationally representative surveys that include detailed information on the prevalence of spousal abuse and threats of violence against women. Constructing comparable groups of beneficiary and nonbeneficiary households within each village to minimize potential selection biases, the present study finds that, in contrast to the short-run estimates, physical and emotional abuse rates over the long term do not differ significantly between existing beneficiary and nonbeneficiary couples. The paper examines possible causes for the difference, most importantly, the role that marital selection and the diffusion of norms rejecting intimate partner violence may play in explaining these effects.

The paper analyzes a new Honduran conditional cash transfer experiment (Bono 10,000) in which 150 poor villages (of 300) were treated. The transfers were much larger in size than an earlier experiment (Galiani & McEwan, 2013), but yielded smaller full-sample effects on school enrollment, child labor participation, and measures of health service use. One explanation is that Bono 10,000 did not apply conditions to children: only one child in eligible households was subject to the education condition, and young children and mothers were only subject to health conditions in the absence of older children. Consistent with this, we find a large effect on enrollment (and a nearly off-setting one on child labor) among only children, and smaller and insignificant effects on children in larger households. We only find significant effects on health service use among children and mothers in the absence of older children (despite a much smaller household transfer). The heterogeneity does not appear to be driven by correlated variables such as household size, child age, or poverty.

The IDB has been one of the main supporters of the large expansion of conditional cash transfers (CCTs) in Latin America and the Caribbean over the last 15 years. These programs are designed to tackle poverty by encouraging certain outcomes, such as keeping children in school and attending health checkups, as a requirement for receiving a cash transfer. During 2014 the Office of Evaluation and Oversight (OVE) will conduct a comparative analysis of IDB CCT projects in three lower income countries of the region. The evaluation is expected to provide useful lessons to Bank staff for the design of future operations that involve CCTs in these or similar countries.

Recent empirical evidence has indicated that Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) do not have an aggregate effect on adult labour supply, however little attention has been paid to the role of other intrahousehold dynamics. This paper examines how the bargaining power structure of households affects the parental labour supply response to CCT programmes. We analyse randomized experimental designs from rural areas of Honduras (PRAF), Mexico (PROGRESA), and Nicaragua (RPS), and find that CCT programmes slightly change paternal and maternal labour supply and that this effect depends on the distribution of power in the household.

This paper analyzes the correlation between the expansion of the Mexican Conditional Cash Transfer program Oportunidades and the evolution of the labor market over the period 2000-10. We find no evidence of perverse effects. Program expansion was not associated with drops in either labor force participation or wageformality. On the contrary, the expansion of Oportunidades was strongly correlated with a transition from informal wage employment to self-employment for men (by 1.6% and 0.6% of total employment in rural and urban municipalities respectively). These findings suggest that Oportunidades is not creating dependence from social assistance.