Who Participates? The Supply of Volunteer Labor and the Distribution of Government Programs in Rural Peru

Numerous analysts have linked volunteering and participation to positive economic and political outcomes. Data from rural Peru show that volunteers have a high opportunity cost of time. They are more educated and more likely to hold a job. Other household characteristics, such as gender, marital status, length of residence, and ethnicity are also important predictors of the probability of volunteering. Controlling for household characteristics, there are also large differences across communities in aggregate volunteer levels.Numerous analysts have linked volunteering and participation to positive economic and political outcomes. Schady uses the 1994 Peru Living Standards Measurement Survey to analyze volunteering patterns in rural Peru. He finds that volunteers in rural Peru have a high opportunity cost of time. They are more educated and more likely to hold a job. Other household characteristics, such as gender, marital status, length of residence, and ethnicity, are also important predictors of the probability of volunteering.Controlling for household characteristics, communities differ widely in aggregate volunteer levels. These differences seem unrelated to differences in patterns of government expenditure.Volunteering may have important benefits in building social capital and encouraging greater ownership of development projects. For example, many public programs in rural Peru and elsewhere ask that the intended beneficiaries quot;participatequot; as a means of building trust and social capital, increasing the sustainability of investments and helping self-target investments to the poor.But Schady finds that encouraging participation by potential beneficiaries is unlikely to be an effective form of self-targeting, since people with a higher opportunity cost of time volunteer more. Moreover, social programs that require participation may have difficulty reaching some vulnerable groups, such as women and the illiterate.This paper - a product of the Poverty Sector Unit, Latin America and the Caribbean Region - is part of a larger effort in the region to understand the factors that promote or inhibit participation and empowerment