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There is an extensive literature on the impact of nonrenewable natural resources (NNR) in the fiscal performance of countries. Overall, with few exceptions, the studies suggest an inverse relationship between these two variables. According to the IDB (2013), the presence of NNR can lead to the so called 'resource curse', where the abundance of income that comes from this source adversely affects institutional capacity, governance, and economic growth. There is not too much literature about the impact of the relative abundance of NNR on the fiscal performance of sub-national governments and conflicting results have been found. One of the most recent changes in regional policy in Colombia was the creation of the General Royalties System (SGR by its Spanish acronym) in 2011. Before the new scheme, royalties were distributed to those territories where NNR were extracted and to the maritime or river ports used to transport these resources. With the creation of SGR, these resources began to be distributed between all municipalities and departments through various funds and according to the socioeconomic conditions of each territory. As a result of the increased mining and energy production, royalties increased from 0.6% of GDP in 2002 to 1.66% in 2012. These resources are an important source of funding for projects in sub-national governments. For municipalities, these funds are twice the amount collected by two of the most important municipal taxes, property tax and industry and commerce tax. This is an excellent opportunity to assess the impact of the new system on the fiscal behavior of local authorities. This paper evaluates the effects of the implementation of the SGR on the fiscal performance at the municipality level in 2012, employing a dose-response analysis based on Hirano and Imbens (2004) for a sample of 1,025 municipalities. Unlike conventional impact evaluations comparing treatment and control groups, the dose-response analysis compares municipalities with higher and lower allocation of royalties. The non-randomness of assignments is controlled by estimating the generalized propensity score. The results indicate that a level of 20% allocation of royalties in the total revenue of the municipalities represents an important threshold performance of these localities. It was found that in the 93% of municipalities, where the proportion of royalties in their total revenues are less or equal to 20%, the fiscal performance measured by several indexes worsens, while the dependency on the royalties increases. On the other hand, if such proportion is higher than 20% the fiscal performance improves but the local investment falls. Given that the reform assigned resources but did not guarantee their appropriation by the municipalities, these results can be explained by the low execution of royalties during 2012.

This paper studies the first large scale effort by the Brazilian government to increase the social security compliance of self-employed workers using behavioral interventions. In 2014, the Brazilian Ministry of Social Security gradually delivered by postal mail a booklet reminding nearly 3 million self-employed workers their obligation to contribute to social security. We find that, sending the booklet increased payments by 15 percent and compliance rates by 7 percentage points. This increase is concentrated around the month the booklet was delivered and disappears three months after the intervention, a pattern known as action and backsliding. The relatively brief increase in payments outweighs the cost of sending the booklet by at least a factor of 2. Our results suggest that active behavioral interventions could be used as policy instruments that are orders of magnitude more cost-effective than subsides to increase social security contributions in developing countries, particularly for the self-employed.

Social protection programmes have emerged as one of the most important anti-poverty policy strategies in developing countries. Their effects on poverty and well-being have been widely studied. Yet, there is limited knowledge on how a transfer programme should respond to the dynamics of poverty. This paper contributes to the existing literature on social protection by providing an analysis of the implications of poverty dynamics for the graduation of beneficiaries of Mexico's Oportunidades programme. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that provides a framework for a generic graduation condition, to the extent that it can be applied to any other transfer programme with means tests or proxy-means tests. By estimating a Markovian transition model that accounts for unobserved heterogeneity, state dependence, and attrition, and using three rounds of the longitudinal Mexican Family Life Survey, we find that Oportunidades could 'graduate' only 28.9 and 26.7 per cent of beneficiary households in urban and rural areas, respectively. Our results also show that the 'recertification' or eligibility assessment of Oportunidades - which takes place every three years - could be optimized by conducting it every 3.5 and 4.1 years in urban and rural areas, respectively.

The effects of social transfers on growth are still unclear. The limitations of aggregated data at sub-national levels have confined the analysis to the use of simulation models and household surveys. As an alternative, this paper contributes to the empirical literature by assessing the effects of Colombia's Familias en Accion, a human development cash transfer programme, on municipality level growth rates during its initial stage of implementation between 2000 and 2004. The natural experiment that resulted from the scaling-up of the intervention facilitated the set-up of a difference-in-differences analysis. The lack of sub-national GDP accounts is tackled by using luminosity data generated by satellites orbiting the earth, which have demonstrated to be a suitable proxy for economic growth and per capita growth. The results show that the programme can generate large positive effects on municipality level economic growth rates. Robustness checks confirm the reliability of these findings.

This paper presents an impact evaluation of a revamped version of the Dominican youth training program Juventud y Empleo. The paper analyzes the impact of the program on traditional labor market outcomes and on outcomes related to youth behavior and life style, expectations about the future and socio-emotional skills. In terms of labor market outcomes, the program has a positive impact on job formality for men of about 17 percent and there is also a seven percent increase in monthly earnings among those employed. However, there are no overall impacts on employment rates. Regarding non-labor market outcomes, the program reduces teenage pregnancy by five percentage points in the treatment group (about 45 percent), which is consistent with an overall increase in youth expectations about the future. The program also has a positive impact on non-cognitive skills as measured by three different scales. Scores improve between 0.08 and 0.16 standard deviations with the program. Although recent progress noted in the literature suggests that socio-emotional skills increase employability and quality of employment, the practical significance of the impacts is unclear, as there is only weak evidence that the life skills measures used are associated to better labor market performance. This is an area of growing interest and relevance that requires further research.

The guide outlines the main evaluation challenges associated with ALMP s, and shows how to obtain rigorous impact estimates using two leading evaluation approaches. The most credible and straightforward evaluation method is a randomized design, in which a group of potential participants is randomly divided into a treatment and a control group. Random assignment ensures that the two groups would have had similar experiences in the post-program period in the absence of the program intervention. The observed post-program difference therefore yields a reliable estimate of the program impact. The second approach is a difference in differences design that compares the change in outcomes between the participant group and a selected comparison group from before to after the completion of the program. In general the outcomes of the comparison group may differ from the outcomes of the participant group, even in the absence of the program intervention. If the difference observed prior to the program would have persisted in the absence of the program, however, then the change in the outcome gap between the two groups yields a reliable estimate of the program impact. This guideline reviews the various steps in the design and implementation of ALMP s, and in subsequent analysis of the program data, that will ensure a rigorous and informative impact evaluation using either of these two techniques.

In response to high demands for lower level poverty estimates, the National Statistical Coordination Board releases provincial estimates, in addition to the national and regional, starting with the 1997 FIES. However, estimates of the coefficients of variation (CV) of several provincial estimates indicate that the resulting poverty measures are not reliable. Making a decision based on unreliable poverty statistics is very risky especially if the decision to be made relates to the welfare of poor families. Such unreliable poverty statistics may also lead to incorrect targeting of the right beneficiaries of the poverty alleviation program. Hence, this paper provides alternative ways of coming up with subnational statistics (i.e., provincial and municipal/city-level data) that yield lower CVs than those of the official ones. This refers to the small area estimation (SAE) technique, a model-based approach to produce provincial or even municipal-level data. With a good predicting model, the SAE technique has a lot of potential in providing reliable subnational estimates for poverty reduction efforts.