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Picking the Poor
Geographic targeting of social programs to the poor has become increasingly important in Peru. The potential payoffs of such targeting are large, and differences in outcomes with different targeting indicators are small.
Off and Running?
The authors describe the evolution of relative wages in five Latin American countries-Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. They use repeated cross-sections of household surveys, and decompose the evolution of relative wages into factors associated with changes in relative supply and relative demand. The authors have three main conclusions: 1) Increases in the relative wages of the most skilled (university-educated) workers took place concurrently with increases in their relative abundance in all of the countries except Brazil. This is strong evidence of increases in the demand for skilled workers. 2) Increases in the wage bill of skilled workers occurred largely within sectors, an...
Cash Transfers, Conditions, School Enrollment, and Child Work
"The impact of cash transfer programs on the accumulation of human capital is a topic of great policy importance. An attendant question is whether program effects are larger when transfers are "conditioned" on certain behaviors, such as a requirement that households enroll their children in school. This paper uses a randomized study design to analyze the impact of the Bono de Desarrollo Humano (BDH), a cash transfer program, on enrollment and child work among poor children in Ecuador. There are two main results. First, the BDH program had a large, positive impact on school enrollment, about 10 percentage points, and a large, negative impact on child work, about 17 percentage points. Second, the fact that some households believed that there was a school enrollment requirement attached to the transfers, even though such a requirement was never enforced or monitored in Ecuador, helps explain the magnitude of program effects.."--World Bank web site.
Cognitive Development Among Young Children in Ecuador
Paxson and Schady examine the relationship between early cognitive development, socioeconomic status, child health, and parenting quality in a developing country. They use a sample of over 3,000 predominantly poor pre-school age children from Ecuador and analyze determinants of their scores on the Spanish version of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (TVIP), a widely used test of language ability. The authors show that median age-normed test scores on the TVIP are much lower for older than younger children, and there is greater dispersion in scores among older children. They find that household socioeconomic characteristics, in particular wealth and parental education, are "protective"-chil...
Early Childhood Development in Latin America and the Caribbean
"There is considerable evidence that young children in many developing countries suffer from profound deficits in nutrition, health, fine and gross motor skills, cognitive development, and socio-emotional development. Early childhood development (ECD) outcomes are important markers of the welfare of children. In addition, the deleterious effects of poor outcomes in early childhood can be long-lasting, affecting school attainment, employment, wages, criminality, and measures of social integration of adults. This paper considers the theoretical case to be made for investments in early childhood, selectively reviews the literature on the impact of ECD programs in the United States, discusses th...
Who Participates?
Numerous analysts have linked volunteering and participation to positive economic and political outcomes. Data from rural Peru show that volunteers have a high opportunity cost of time. They are more educated and more likely to hold a job. Other household characteristics, such as gender, marital status, length of residence, and ethnicity are also important predictors of the probability of volunteering. Controlling for household characteristics, there are also large differences across communities in aggregate volunteer levels.
Toward Universal Health Coverage and Equity in Latin America and the Caribbean
Over the past three decades, many countries of Latin America and the Caribbean have recognized health as a human right. Since the early 2000s, 46 million more people in the countries studied are covered by health programs with explicit guarantees of affordable care. Reforms have been accompanied by a rise in public spending for health, financed largely from general revenues that prioritized or explicitly target the population without capacity to pay. Political commitment has generally translated into larger budgets as well as passage of legislation that ring-fenced funding for health. Most countries have prioritized cost-effective primary care and adopted purchasing methods that incentivize ...
Public Health Nutrition
This foundational textbook provides a thorough understanding of the role of nutrition in public health in communities around the world. Nutrition is a fundamental building block for optimal health. In this essential textbook, Jessica Jones-Smith presents readers with a balanced introduction to the field of public health nutrition. Examining common nutrition-related problems in both high- and low-income countries, Jones-Smith allows students to draw connections between the principles and realities of public health nutrition. She also describes the fundamental tools of public health nutrition, from nutrition assessment to program monitoring and evaluation, as well as current and future solutio...
Are Cash Transfers Made to Women Spent Like Other Sources of Income?
How cash transfers made to women are used has important implications for models of household behavior and for the design of social programs. In this paper, the authors use the randomized introduction of an unconditional cash transfer to poor women in rural Ecuador to analyze the effect of transfers on the food Engel curve. There are two main findings. First, the authors show that households randomly assigned to receive Bono de Desarrollo Humano (BDH) transfers have a significantly higher food share in expenditures than those that were randomly assigned to the control group. Second, they show that the rising food share among BDH beneficiaries is found among households that have both adult mal...
Voice and Agency
Despite recent advances in important aspects of the lives of girls and women, pervasive challenges remain. These challenges reflect widespread deprivations and constraints and include epidemic levels of gender-based violence and discriminatory laws and norms that prevent women from owning property, being educated, and making meaningful decisions about their own lives--such as whether and when to marry or have children. These often violate their most basic rights and are magnified and multiplied by poverty and lack of education. This groundbreaking book distills vast data and hundreds of studies to shed new light on deprivations and constraints facing the voice and agency of women and girls w...
