In recent years, reducing poverty has been a core objective of social policy in Latin America. In2008, the incidence of poverty reached almost a third of the population, of which 13 percent areclassified as extremely poor. Most Latin American countries have invested vast resources inpoverty...

This paper is a comparison between two programs implemented to combat poverty in Latin America: Prospera (Prosper) in Mexico and Asignación Universal por Hijo (Universal Assignment for Child) in Argentina. The first section offers a review of the emergence of the welfare state, examining...

Conditional Cash Transfers (CCT) are programs under which poor families get a stipend provided they keep their children in school and take them for health checks. While there is significant evidence showing that they have positive impacts on school participation, little is known about their...

This paper estimates the effect of enrollment in a large scale anti-poverty program in Colombia, Familias en Acción (FA), on intent to vote, turnout and electoral choice. For identification we use discontinuities in program eligibility and variation in program enrollment across voting booths....

This paper discusses social protection initiatives in the context of developing countries and explores the opportunities they present for promoting a gender-equality agenda and women's empowerment. The paper begins with a brief introduction on the emergence of social protection (SP) and how it...

Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs are gaining more and more weight in Latin America's public policy. Although there exists a wide range of literature about the impact of these programs on school matriculation, the reduction in child labour and the improvements in the health status of...

This paper examines the effects of Chile Solidario programme on labour market outcomes from a gender perspective. Chile Solidario was implemented as the main anti-poverty programme in Chile in 2002. The purpose of this conditional cash transfer is to provide poor families with auxiliary social...

This paper estimates country-specific costs and benefits of scaling up key nutrition investments in Nigeria. Building on the methodology established in the global report scaling up nutrition: what will it cost? Authors first estimate the costs and benefits of a nationwide scale up of ten...

This paper studies the impact of the conditional cash transfer program Solidaridad on changes in the labor market of the Dominican Republic based on statistical data from the Evaluation of the Social Security Survey 2010. The estimation methodology is based on matching techniques, which can...

In the past decade, conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs have become an important component of social policy in developing countries. While the impacts of these programs have been well researched with respect to their effectiveness to achieve intended outcomes, less is known about their...