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The study aims to analyze overall life satisfaction (OLS) and the financial well-being (FWB) of low income individuals by investigating 595 beneficiaries of the Bolsa Família Program through a questionnaire. The data analysis includes descriptive statistics, structural equation modeling, and clustering. The main results show that the people in this sample are satisfied overall with life, but are worried about and feel uncomfortable with the amount they owe, which lowers FWB. Confirming this result, the most representative cluster is made up of beneficiaries with high OLS and low FWB, who have precarious financial conditions, past due accounts and negative credit records as well as budget constraints that mean they cannot accumulate savings and cannot afford extra consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bolsa Família, the world's largest conditional cash transfer, provides welfare payments to 13 million Brazilian households – and creates dilemmas for Brazil's rural landless movement, the MST. Through ethnographic analysis in two villages, this paper explores the daily practices and political conceptions of the program's beneficiaries. Bolsa Família does not, as is often believed, create a de-radicalizing sense of contentment. Instead, the program generates a temporality that makes the benefit feel unreliable to beneficiaries. These beneficiaries must mediate the tension between ‘citizen’ and ‘manager’ identities, the latter being a salient subject-position produced by Bolsa Família. The precarity of this position helps explain why Bolsa Família hasnotinspired significant mobilization by social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The conditional cash transfer (CCT) programme Bolsa Família (Family Allowance), introduced in Brazil in 2003, is one of the largest such programmes in the world. Bolsa Família has played a role in the recent reduction of poverty and income inequality in Brazil. But what has been its impact on democracy? An assumption in the literature on social policy, derived from the European experience, is that targeted programmes such as Bolsa Família divide citizens, erode trust between citizens and between citizens and the state, and weaken democracy. This article challenges that assumption, showing that there is considerable evidence that Bolsa Família has strengthened the citizenship rights of the poor and enhanced democracy. The Brazilian experience suggests that, in highly unequal developing countries under conditions of 21st-century capitalism, the argument that targeted social programmes will inevitably undermine democracy is incorrect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the fairness of conditional cash grants that provide cash to the poor under certain specified conditions to attain the goals of poverty reduction as in the case of Bolsa Familia in Brazil and Oportunidades in Mexico. The study revealed that the operational dimension of conditional cash grants fails to distinguish the deserving from the undeserving poor. Therefore, its targeting process should be revised to be more inclusive and sensitive to differences of individuals.