The Impacts of Cash Transfers on Subjective Wellbeing and Poverty: The Case of Colombia

Daniel Morales Martínez () and Alexandre Gori Maia
Additional contact information
Daniel Morales Martínez: University of Campinas

Journal of Family and Economic Issues, 2018, vol. 39, issue 4, No 8, 616-633

Abstract: Abstract Cash transfer programs have been the main social policy in the fight against poverty and inequality in Latin-American countries. This paper analyzes the impacts of the program Más Familias en Acción on the perception of poverty and subjective wellbeing in Colombia. The analyses are based on data from the Encuesta Nacional de Calidad de Vida between 2008 and 2016. Two empirical strategies were compared to account for the lack of randomness in groups of beneficiary and non-beneficiary families: (i) non-experimental designs (linear and nonlinear models with cross-sectional and pooled data); (ii) quasi-experimental designs (Propensity Score Matching and Inverse Probability Weighted Regression Adjustment). The results were robust to the different empirical strategies and emphasized that: (i) transfers increase the perception of food insecurity and subjective poverty; (ii) conditionalities involve positive impacts on different indicators of subjective wellbeing, especially health and education; (iii) general impacts on the perceptions of life are nonsignificant, as a result of divergent impacts on the dimensions of the subjective wellbeing of families.

Keywords: Subjective poverty; Subjective wellbeing; Public policies; Impact assessment; Matching (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10834-018-9585-4 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jfamec:v:39:y:2018:i:4:d:10.1007_s10834-018-9585-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... es/journal/10834/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10834-018-9585-4

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Family and Economic Issues is currently edited by Joyce Serido

More articles in Journal of Family and Economic Issues from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().