Income gains to the poor from workfare - estimates for Argentina's TRABAJAR Program

Jyotsna Jalan and Martin Ravallion

No 2149, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: The authors use propensity-score matching methods to estimate the income gains to families of workers participating in an Argentinian work-fare program. The methods they propose are feasible for evaluating safety net interventions in settings in which many other methods are not feasible. The average gain is about half the gross wage. Even allowing for forgone income, the distribution of gains is decidedly pro-poor. More than half the beneficiaries are in the poorest decile nationally and 80- percent of them are in the poorest quintile --reflecting the self-targeting feature of the program design. Average gains for men and women are similar, but gains are higher for younger workers. Women's greater participation would not enhance average income gains, and the distribution of gains would worsen. Greater participation by the young would raise average gains but would also worsen the distribution.

Keywords: Payment Systems&Infrastructure; Poverty Monitoring&Analysis; Services&Transfers to Poor; Health Economics&Finance; Poverty Impact Evaluation; Poverty Monitoring&Analysis; Poverty Impact Evaluation; Health Economics&Finance; Rural Poverty Reduction; Services&Transfers to Poor (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1999-07-31
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (32)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSC ... d/PDF/multi_page.pdf (application/pdf)

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:wbk:wbrwps:2149

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank 1818 H Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20433. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Roula I. Yazigi ().