Suchergebnisse

Most countries in Latin America have implemented human development conditional income transfer programmes to address intergenerational persistence of poverty. Typically, these programmes provide income transfers to households in poverty, conditional on children attending school and on household members attending health clinics. Evaluations have established that programmes reach their explicit short- and medium-term objectives, especially as regards nutrition, children's schooling and improved health care utilisation. It is too early to say whether they will be successful in reducing the intergenerational persistence of poverty. Crucially, this will depend on whether they contribute to the economic and political inclusion of groups in poverty. This article reviews the available literature and finds that participation in human development conditional income transfer programmes leads to improvements in productive capacity, but that favourable labour market conditions will be needed to guarantee economic inclusion. Improved political participation associated with programme participation raises the prospects for greater political inclusion.

The paper provides a comparative analysis of the incidence of evaluation methods in antipoverty transfer programmes in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. The paper identifies two broad explanations for the incidence of evaluation in antipoverty transfer programmes in developing countries, one emphasizing the advantages of a shift towards evidence-based development policy, and a second explanation emphasizing political factors. The paper assesses their relevance in the context of Latin American and sub-Saharan African countries with a view to throwing light on whether the evaluation of antipoverty transfer programmes will lead to an improved effectiveness of the relevant government agencies.

This paper studies the first large scale effort by the Brazilian government to increase the social security compliance of self-employed workers using behavioral interventions. In 2014, the Brazilian Ministry of Social Security gradually delivered by postal mail a booklet reminding nearly 3 million self-employed workers their obligation to contribute to social security. We find that, sending the booklet increased payments by 15 percent and compliance rates by 7 percentage points. This increase is concentrated around the month the booklet was delivered and disappears three months after the intervention, a pattern known as action and backsliding. The relatively brief increase in payments outweighs the cost of sending the booklet by at least a factor of 2. Our results suggest that active behavioral interventions could be used as policy instruments that are orders of magnitude more cost-effective than subsides to increase social security contributions in developing countries, particularly for the self-employed.