Ex-ante Evaluation of Conditional Cash Transfer Programs: The Case of Bolsa Escola
Cash transfers targeted to poor people, but conditional on some behavior on their part, such as school attendance or regular visits to health care facilities, are being adopted in a growing number of developing countries. Even where ex-post impact...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Policy Research Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2014
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2002/10/2874516/ex-ante-evaluation-conditional-cash-transfer-programs-case-bolsa-escola http://hdl.handle.net/10986/19236 |
| Summary: | Cash transfers targeted to poor people,
but conditional on some behavior on their part, such as
school attendance or regular visits to health care
facilities, are being adopted in a growing number of
developing countries. Even where ex-post impact evaluations
have been conducted, a number of policy-relevant
counterfactual questions have remained unanswered. These are
questions about the potential impact of changes in program
design, such as benefit levels or the choice of the
means-test, on both the current welfare and the behavioral
response of household members. This paper proposes a method
to simulate the effects of those alternative program designs
on welfare and behavior, based on microeconometrically
estimated models of household behavior. In an application to
Brazil's recently introduced federal Bolsa Escola
program, the authors find a surprisingly strong effect of
the conditionality on school attendance, but a muted impact
of the transfers on the reduction of current poverty and
inequality levels |
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