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This paper investigates the impact of the pilot phase of Paraguay's conditional cash transfer programme, Tekoporã, on the demand for healthcare and education, and how much of this impact was due to the cash transfers and/or due to changes in behaviour/preferences, possibly as an effect of other, non-monetary programme components such as the conditionalities and family support visits. It also explores the presence of externalities effects through a decomposition of the average treatment effect on the treated (ATT) into participation and externality effect. This decomposition was possible thanks to the use of two distinct comparison groups, one within the village and possibly exposed to the externality, and another in a different district not affected by the programme. The results indicate that the programme was successful in improving children's attendance at school and increasing visits to the health centres. They also suggest that the positive impacts do not reach non-beneficiary families (no externality effect). In the pilot phase, with no conditionality enforcement in place, the role of conditionality and social worker visits is not yet clear. No differential effect was found for those who were aware of the conditionalities and/or were visited by social workers, although the message of the importance of education and healthcare somehow did reach the households, altering their preferences towards a greater consumption of healthcare and education services.

In this paper we propose a method to estimate externality effects in cash transfer programmes, even in cases when the benefit is not randomly assigned. Externality is assessed through the decomposition of the average treatment effect on the treated (ATT) into participation (direct) effect and externality (indirect) effect. We also suggest a nonparametric decomposition to investigate whether changes in household outcomes are caused by the income transfer itself or by the other non-monetary components of the programme, such as conditionalities and family support services. We apply all these decompositions on the effect of a conditional cash transfer (CCT) programme on household consumption and savings in Paraguay. This was possible because of the presence of two distinct comparison groups, one within the village and potentially exposed to the externality, and another in a different village not affected by the programme. Furthermore, the evaluation survey collected information on both income and consumption. The results indicate that the programme has a small impact on consumption and a considerable impact on savings. In the absence of externality, however, the programme would have a higher effect on consumption, mostly associated with the cash transfer, and a lower effect on savings. Moreover, the impact on the pattern of consumption is significantly related to a substitution effect and is not related to the increase in income.

[Introduction] The trade-off between targeting and coverage has always been something of a quandary for progressive cash transfers, particularly those that are not entitlements. Undue inclusion errors mean that families or individuals whose need is not so great are being paid at the expense of either taxpayers or other budgetary priorities. Undue exclusion errors mean that those who are in need, sometimes in desperate need, are not being helped by the state. This trade-off is somewhat less extreme for entitlements. If the law says that families whose income is less than a quarter of a minimum wage are entitled to a given cash allowance, then all those whose income falls under that line should receive the allowance. There is still a trade-off because measurement error still occurs, but the discussion centres only on the inclusion criteria. Most conditional cash transfers (CCTs), however, are not entitlements. When cash transfers of any kind are not entitlements, the targeting-coverage trade-off becomes more dramatic. In addition to inclusion criteria, coverage targets must be set and met. These coverage targets are usually set ex-ante and estimated before administrative records have given a clear idea of what is happening at the micro household level. Since these cash transfer programmes have suffered (or benefitted) from very high political visibility, it becomes difficult to change coverage targets once these are announced. Our objective in this paper is to illustrate these quandaries using Latin America’s largest CCT scheme, Brazil’s Bolsa Família programme (PBF). To do this, we first describe briefly how the programme came to be and its targeting mechanisms. Section 3 discusses the size of the programme according to different criteria (this is important in deciding whether it is too small or just right). The following section evaluates how good Bolsa Família is at reaching the poor and only the poor. Section 5 considers the concept of income volatility and why the poor are especially hard-hit by uncertainty about tomorrow’s income. Section 6 examines cross-sectional coverage. Section 7 discusses Bolsa Família’s marginal targeting and explains why this is the right concept to use in estimating how big it should be to cover all the poor.

In 2006, the Bolsa Família Program completed its expansion, expecting to cover 11 million beneficiary families. The objective of this article is to evaluate whether this implied in deterioration in the program's efficient targeting and whether the target of 11 million families in fact covers the entirety of Bolsa Família's eligible target population. Our results are twofold. First, the increase in the coverage was followed by a slightly fall in the targeting. However, we do not find evidences that the coverage increase caused a worse targeting by itself. In addition, that coverage target is insufficient to cover the eligible population due to targeting errors and the size of the program. Taking into consideration the inevitable targeting errors, we estimate that the program should expand up to 15 millions of beneficiary families. Additionally, we show that a considerable part of the so-called inclusion error may be explained by the income volatility of poor families that makes the real target population of Bolsa Família (those families that are or soon will be below R$ 120 per capita) considerably larger that that calculated using a cross-section estimate of the income distribution in a given moment.

The panel data of the Brazilian Monthly Employment Survey - Pesquisa Mensal de Emprego (PME/IBGE) is actually one of the richest datasets for analysis of labor market in Brazil. The reason is its longitudinal design. Since it is only addressed to labor market investigations, its questionnaire fields only information related to labor income though, not considering other types of income sources, such as pensions, retirement benefits, social transfers etc. Given such a limitation, this paper presents a proposal to improve PME`s utility. This proposal consists of imputing non-labor income at PME, based on an equation system estimated by means of the Brazilian Household Survey - Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicílios (Pnad/IBGE). Besides describing this imputation model and its consistency in reproducing the same statistics at both PME and Pnad, the paper presents some stylized facts on the dynamics of poverty and inequality in Brazilian Metropolitan Regions (MRs). Due to their dynamic feature, it is indeed impossible to estimate these facts using another Brazilian data that not the imputed PME. Our results basically regard the following issues: seasonality and tendency of poverty and inequality; rates of transition into and out of poverty; and comparison between the incidence rates of chronic poverty and observed poverty.

The purpose of this article is to explain how to use the Pesquisa Mensal de Emprego (PME) and in particular to explain in detail how to set up the household panel. The PME household panel is an extremely useful analytical instrument that has been sadly underused due to several practical construction difficulties. The main objective of this text is to dispel these difficulties so as to open the household panel to researchers who previously did not know how to set it up. The first part of the text explains how to read the microdata and set up the PME household panel, and includes an explanation of its rotation scheme. Even this simple task becomes relatively complex due to how the PME is organized. The second part of the text deals with individuals and supplies some simple procedures for increasing the percentage of individuals successfully identified in the household panel. These procedures work because identifiable reporting error and identifiable changes in household composition reduce the percentage of individuals identified. Finally, we show how increasing the rate of individual identification improves econometric estimates using as an example labor market insertion.

Our objective is to analyze the gravity of panel attrition in the Brazilian Monthly Employment Survey (PME). There are three types of panel attrition: a) random, that does not produce any selection bias; b) function of observables, whose bias can be corrected through an appropriate re-weighing scheme; and c) function of unobservable variables, whose bias can be corrected through a bivariate probit for discrete variables or a Heckman correction for continuous ones. To test the gravity of panel attrition bias we estimated a transition to unemployment model both with and without attrition bias controls. Our results are that attrition tends to increase during school vacations and that attrition is strongly correlated to geographical mobility. Our conclusion is that while attrition bias does exist, its magnitude is small and its elimination does not substantially change analysis made using the models. In addition, in some cases, since it is not possible to control simultaneously for observable and non-observable attrition bias, in some cases the best procedure is not use on controls at all.

The objective of this paper is to estimate the length of poverty spells and its determinants. We analyze if short-term changes in the labor market affect the probability of staying in poverty. On the assumption that poverty transitions occur more frequently when we use a monthly data rather than an annual data, we are using the panel data of Brazilian Monthly Employment Survey (PME) from March of 2002 to May of 2007. PME is the only panel data which is available in Brazil to carry out this kind of analysis. However, considering that this survey follows households for a very short period, we had to adopt estimation techniques which control cases of right- and left-censoring. The most important results are: how longer the poverty spells, lower the probability to escape from it; households with elderlies have more chances to exit poverty than the others. In the labor market, changes in unemployment rate do not affect directly poverty duration. The effect of unemployment rate occurs indirectly by means of the seasonality of economic activity and of changes in the average wage.

Ao longo das últimas décadas, a pobreza no Brasil vem mudando seu perfil, devido, em parte, a alterações no padrão de reprodução e mortalidade da população. Da mesma forma, os desenhos de políticas sociais, especialmente de combate à pobreza, tomaram outros rumos. Nesse aspecto, a pertinência desses novos desenhos depende da natureza da condição de baixa renda, podendo ser entendida como um fenômeno permanente ou temporário e, principalmente, da tendência de mudanças nessa composição transitória-crônica (T-C). O objetivo deste trabalho é justamente analisar essa tendência, assim como o processo de incidência da pobreza urbana, em termos de mudanças ao longo do tempo e de gerações de indivíduos, projetando medidas futuras de privação na renda. Para tanto, é utilizado um modelo de idade-período-coorte (IPC) sobre a pobreza, absoluta e relativa, observada nas PNADs entre 1995 e 2003, e sobre sua composição T-C estimada. Os resultados apontam que o efeito coorte é mais expressivo do que o de período sobre a redução da pobreza recentemente, em especial de seu componente crônico. Já o componente transitório apresenta tendência de aumento ao longo do tempo. The profile of poverty in Brazil has changed in recent decades, partially due to alterations in the reproduction and mortality standards of the population. During this same period, the designs of social policies, especially those for reducing poverty, have also undergone changes. It must be emphasized that the effectiveness of these policies depends on the type of poverty that is being dealt with. Destitution can be a permanent or temporary phenomenon, and this transient-chronic (T-C) composition may show a temporal trend. The objective of this paper is to analyze this trend as well as the temporal evolution of poverty rates in urban areas. The result may make it possible to predict future income and destitution. To this end, an Age-Period-Cohort (APC) model was applied to absolute and relative poverty measures and to the T-C composition, based on data from the PNADs between 1995 and 2003. The results indicate that the cohort-effect is more expressive than the period effect for the recent reduction in poverty rates, especially for the chronic component. In contrast, the transient component showed a relative temporal tendency to increase. A lo largo de las últimas décadas, la pobreza en Brasil viene cambiando su perfil, debido, en parte, a modificaciones en el padrón de reproducción y mortalidad de la población. De la misma forma, los diseños de políticas sociales, especialmente de combate a la pobreza, tomaron otros rumbos. En este aspecto, la pertinencia de esos nuevos diseños depende de la naturaleza de la condición de baja renta, pudiendo ser entendida como un fenómeno permanente o temporal y, principalmente, de la tendencia de cambios en esa composición transitoria-crónica (T-C). El objetivo de este trabajo es justamente analizar esa tendencia, así como el proceso de incidencia de la pobreza urbana, en términos de modificaciones a lo largo del tiempo y de generaciones de individuos, proyectando medidas futuras de privación en la renta. Para ello es utilizado un modelo de edad-período-cohorte (IPC) sobre la pobreza, absoluta y relativa, observada en las PNADs entre 1995 y 2003, y sobre su composición T-C estimada. Los resultados apuntan que el efecto cohorte es más indicativo que el de período sobre la reducción de la pobreza recientemente, en especial de su componente crónico. Ya el componente transitorio presenta tendencia de aumento a lo largo del tiempo.

This article reports the results of a research about the sustai-nability of extractive farmers in the Atlantic slopes of Rio Grande do Sul. The extractive economy at issue is related to a species usually known as leather fern (Rumohra adiantiformis (G.Forest.) Ching). It is estimated that 3,000 families in the region perform this non-regulated activity, whi-ch is their only source of income. The sustainability degree of farmers was calculated from information related to environmental, social and eco-nomic dimensions, and to productivity, stability, equity, resilience, and autonomy criteria. The analysis focused on the comparison among the In-dexes Related to Dimension (IRD), Criteria (IRC) and Sustainability (IRS) of each kind of production system. The results pointed to the existence of four kinds of production systems, and three of them were included in this research. The sustainability indexes showed that the production system type 3 was the most sustainable, followed by type 2 and, fi nally, type 1.

This article reports the results of a research about the sustai-nability of extractive farmers in the Atlantic slopes of Rio Grande do Sul. The extractive economy at issue is related to a species usually known as leather fern (Rumohra adiantiformis (G.Forest.) Ching). It is estimated that 3,000 families in the region perform this non-regulated activity, whi-ch is their only source of income. The sustainability degree of farmers was calculated from information related to environmental, social and eco-nomic dimensions, and to productivity, stability, equity, resilience, and autonomy criteria. The analysis focused on the comparison among the In-dexes Related to Dimension (IRD), Criteria (IRC) and Sustainability (IRS) of each kind of production system. The results pointed to the existence of four kinds of production systems, and three of them were included in this research. The sustainability indexes showed that the production system type 3 was the most sustainable, followed by type 2 and, ï¬ nally, type 1.