Is Health of the Aging Improved by Conditional Cash Transfer Programs? Evidence From Mexico
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Is Health of the Aging Improved by Conditional Cash Transfer Programs? Evidence From Mexico Jere R. Behrman & Susan W. Parker
Published online: 14 March 2013 # Population Association of America 2013
Abstract Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs link public transfers to human capital investment in the hopes of alleviating current poverty and reducing its intergenerational transmission. Whereas nearly all studies of their effects have focused on youth, CCT programs may also have an impact on aging adults by increasing household resources or inducing changes in allocations of time of household members, which may be of substantial interest, particularly given the rapid aging of most populations. This article contributes to this underresearched area by examining health and work impacts on the aging for the best-known and most influential of these programs, the Mexican PROGRESA/Oportunidades program. For a number of health indicators, the program appears to significantly improve health, with larger effects for recipients with a greater time receiving benefits from the program. Most of these health effects are concentrated on women. Keywords Health . Aging . Conditional cash transfers . Mexico
Introduction Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs have spread widely throughout the world since they first were introduced in Brazil and Mexico in 1997, with more than 30 such programs in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), Asia, Africa, and North
J. R. Behrman Economics Department, McNeil 160, University of Pennsylvania, 3718 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6297, USA e-mail: [email protected] S. W. Parker (*) Division of Economics, Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE), Carretera Mexico-Toluca No. 3655, 01210 Mexico, DF, Mexico e-mail: [email protected]
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J.R. Behrman, S.W. Parker
America (Fiszbein and Schady 2009). Most research on the effects of these programs has focused on schooling and nutritional and health status of children and adolescents or on household consumption and savings. However, these CCT programs may also have an effect on aging adults—for example, by increasing household resources or inducing changes in allocations of time of household members—that may be of substantial interest, particularly given the rapid aging of most populations.1 This article contributes to the underresearched area of the effect of CCT programs on aging adults by examining these effects for the best-known and most influential of these programs, the Mexican PROGRESA/Oportunidades2 antipoverty and human resource investment program. This program was introduced originally in small rural communities (with populations less than 2,500) in 1997 and has since been expanded to cover more than 30 million eligible (poor) Mexicans in all but the largest urban areas. The program incorporated data collection and systematic evaluation as an integral component from the start, with an initial experimental design in rural areas with random assignment for the first approximately 1.5 years of treatment among 506
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