Suchergebnisse

Since the turn of the Century, social protection has expanded rapidly across the Global South. The pace by which these programmes have expanded, and the type of programmes that have been adopted, vary substantially across countries. This article has two objectives: first, it provides an overview of the political economy literature of social protection adoption, focusing on the factors that the literature highlights as underpinning the adoption of social protection programmes in MICs and LICs. Second, we empirically examine these underlying determinants. Overall, we find evidence indicating that past democratization has had a positive effect on the current expansion social transfers. Electoral democracies seem to have favoured the expansion of CCTs and social pensions, whereas autocracies and infant electoral democracies have favoured pure cash transfers and public works, which are, on average, smaller in scale and are more prone to political clientelism. The level of economic development, demographic characteristics and state capabilities also matter for the adoption and scalability of social transfers.

En el presente texto se analiza la relación entre trabajo infantil y rendimiento escolar en matemáticas en estudiantes mexicanos de primaria y secundaria a nivel nacional. Se empleó el método de variables instrumentales (VI), ya que la modelación conjunta del trabajo infantil y el rendimiento escolar pueden generar endogeneidad. Incluso, controlando por la pobrezadel hogar, la modalidad educativa y el grado de marginación de la comunidad, los resultados muestran que el efecto del trabajo infantil sobre el rendimiento escolar es negativo y no hay diferencia entre trabajar en un negocio familiar o no en ambos niveles escolares. Distinguiendo por género, existe evidencia de que el resultado es más pronunciado en niñas que en niños.

This study presents an analysis of the electoral impacts of one of the most prominent conditional cash transfers in the world: Mexico's Progresa-Oportunidades-Prospera (POP) programme. Using population censuses, and POP's administrative records and elections data, we exploit the targeting criteria of the programme and its gradual expansion to implement differencein-differences estimators and a regression discontinuity design for past presidential elections (2000, 2006, and 2012). Overall, we find no sizeable electoral effects of POP in favour to the incumbent in the 2000 and 2012 presidential elections, but instead a significant negative effect in the very competitive presidential election of 2006. We provide a theoretical rationalization for this result, which highlights the role of behaviour towards risk near a subsistence threshold and ex-ante expectations among the poor in control localities that were influenced by campaign externalities. We conclude with a discussion on the implications of our results for future theoretical and empirical research.

En la literatura internacional se ha encontrado consistentemente que los niños obtienen mejores resultados que las niñas en pruebas estandarizadas de matemáticas, mientras lo opuesto sucede en comprensión de lectura. Este artículo realiza un análisis sobre la diferencia de género en los puntajes de exámenes estandarizados en México. Los datos provienen de la prueba ENLACE para educación básica y media superior. En primaria y secundaria las niñas obtienen mejores resultados que los niños en español y en matemáticas para toda la distribución de puntajes, con excepción de matemáticas en la parte alta de la distribución, donde no se observa una diferencia significativa. En el nivel medio superior, en toda la distribución de puntajes, se observa que las niñas superan a los niños en español y lo opuesto sucede para matemáticas.

Voter coercion is a recurrent threat to pro-poor redistribution in young democracies. In this study we focus on Mexico's paradigmatic Progresa-Oportunidades-Prospera (POP) programme. We investigate whether local mayors exploited POP to coerce voters, and if so, what effect these actions had on the municipal incumbent's vote. For identification of vote coercion, we exploit the fact that the so-called 'enlaces municipales'-a municipal liaison officer that under strict apolitical rules acted as the link between the municipal administration and POP-were discontinued in 2008, but then restored in 2010. Our empirical strategy relies on an innovative 'difference-in-differencesin-discontinuities' design, which allows us to compare how election results in competitive electoral districts before and after the discontinuation and restoration of enlaces differed between communities with and without POP. Overall, we find that in close elections, the discontinuation of enlaces increased the vote share to the incumbent by approximately 10.5 per cent, while their restoration decreased that vote share by 6.4 per cent. The results suggest that the discontinuation of enlaces created a rules-free environment that allowed local incumbents to coerce beneficiaries to achieve an electoral gain. A review of the existing ethnographic literature on the role of enlaces in POP's operations provides further evidence to support our findings. Our study underscores the importance of implementing clear and well-designed rules to prevent the political capture of social policies.