Parents play a crucial role in the promotion of early childhood development, and understanding parental perceptions of early childhood development may help enhance parental investments early in life. To explore this question, caregivers were asked to rank their child's intelligence in comparison...

This paper experimentally evaluates a large-scale and low-cost parenting program targeting poor families in Chile. Households in 162 public health centers were randomly assigned to three groups: a control group, a second group that was offered eight weekly group parenting sessions, and a third...

This paper undertakes two calculations, one for all developing countries, the other for 34 developing countries that together account for 90 percent of the world's stunted children. The first calculation asks how much lower a country's per capita income is today as a result of some of its...

"Shared prosperity" has become a common phrase in the development policy discourse. This short paper provides its most widely used operational definition -- the growth rate in the average income of the poorest 40 percent of a country's population -- and describes its origins. The paper discusses...

Longitudinal patterns of child development and socioeconomic status are described for a cohort of children in Madagascar who were surveyed when they were 3–6 and 7-10 years old. Substantial wealth gradients were found across multiple domains: receptive vocabulary, cognition, sustained...

Labor-intensive public works programs are important social protection tools in low-income settings, intended to supplement income of poor households and improve public infrastructure. In this evaluation of the Malawi Social Action Fund, an at-scale, government-operated program, across- and...

It is common for central governments, to delegate authority over the targeting of welfare programs to local community organizations - which may be better informed about who is poor, though possibly less accountable for getting the money to the local poor - while the center retains control over...

What happens to participants in a workfare program--a program that imposes work requirements on welfare recipients--when that program is cut? The authors compare the incomes of workfare participants in Argentina to those of nonparticipants and past participants after a severe contraction in...

Randomly sampled workfare participants in a welfare-dependent region of Argentina were given a voucher that entitled an employer to a sizable wage subsidy. A second sample also received the option of skill training, while a third sample formed the control group. The authors analyze the effects...

The authors assess the impact of Argentina's main social policy response to the severe economic crisis of 2002. The program aimed to provide direct income support for families with dependents, for whom the head had become unemployed due to the crisis. Counterfactual comparisons are based on a...