Insufficient labour income and limited access to employment are critical problems that policy makers must address when designing development strategies in Latin American countries. The persistence of the high incidence of poverty and inequality can be explained largely by the poor performance of...

Despite the recovery of economic growth in Latin America during the 1990s, rising unemployment, high informality rates and sluggish wages lie at the root of high inequality and poverty. This paper looks at changes in hourly earnings from the early 1990s to the early 2000s in three relatively...

Poverty affects a large proportion of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa and, far from decreasing, the proportion and numbers of poor people in Sub-Saharan Africa have actually increased over the last ten years. Policies to reduce poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and elsewhere are defying...

We describe several characteristics of the two most important targeted cash transfer programs in Brazil, the Continuous Cash Benefit (BPC) and the Bolsa Familia. We discuss their institutional aspects, long term sustainability, beneficiaries and levels of targeting. We also address the need for...

This paper evaluates the contribution of cash transfer programmes to the observed fall in inequality in Brazil between 1995 and 2004 as well as its impact on poverty. We use the 2004 Brazilian National Household Survey (PNAD) that for the first time collected data on the incidence of some of the...

This Working Paper decomposes changes in the Gini coefficient in order to investigate whether Conditional Cash Transfers (CCT) have had an inequality reducing effect in three Latin American countries: Brazil, Mexico and Chile. Its technique is the decomposition of the Gini coefficient by factor...

Cash transfer programmes are emerging as indispensable component of poverty reduction strategies. The objectives of alleviating short-term poverty and long-term human capital building are what make cash transfers, particularly conditional ones, attractive. In Latin America, where cash transfers...

There is a lively global debate on how to target beneficiaries of Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programmes. In this Evaluation Note we analyze alternative targeting methods for Paraguay?s CCT programme, Tekoporã. The major practical choice for Paraguay is between a multidimensional...

The International Poverty Centre (IPC), with the support of GTZ and UNFPA, has recently undertaken an impact evaluation of the pilot of Tekoporã, a Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programme in Paraguay. Previously, IPC analysed the logical framework of this programme and its implementation...