Impact Evaluation and Process Evaluation in a General System of Evaluation - Introduction to the Topic by Means of a Case Study : The Tortilla Program

The culture of evaluation of social programs has been institutionalized in Mexico. However, in spite of the efforts of the National Council for Social Policy Evaluation, process evaluation, contrary to impact evaluation, has not received the attention it deserves. This paper presents an example of the usefulness of process evaluation to identify critical aspects in the efficiency of processes and administration of a program by means of a Poisson regression. The example uses information from a program that started in 1986 and disappeared in 2003: the Programa Tortilla