 A New Approach to Social Assistance: Latin America's Experience with Conditional Cash Transfer ProgrammesLaura B. Rawlings International Social Security Review, 2005, vol. 58, issue 2‐3, 133-161 Abstract: Conditional cash transfers are a departure from more traditional approaches to social assistance that represents an innovative and increasingly popular channel for the delivery of social services. Conditional cash transfers provide money to poor families contingent upon certain behaviour, usually investments in human capital such as sending children to school or bringing them to health centres on a regular basis. They seek both to address traditional short‐term income support objectives and promote the longer‐term accumulation of human capital by serving as a demand‐side complement to the supply of health and education services. Evaluation results reveal that this innovative design has been quite successful in addressing many of the failures in delivering social assistance such as poor poverty targeting, disincentive effects and limited welfare impacts. There is clear evidence of success from the first generation of programmes in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Nicaragua in increasing enrolment rates, improving preventive healthcare and raising household consumption. Despite this promising evidence, many questions remain unanswered about conditional cash transfer programmes, including the replicability of their success under different Date: 2005 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:intssr:v:58:y:2005:i:2-3:p:133-161 Access Statistics for this article More articles in International Social Security Review from John Wiley & Sons |
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