The international and local Nicaraguan media have widely reported on the “coffee crisis” in Latin America and there is substantial evidence that there has been a downturn and that this has been more severe in the coffee-growing regions.

This paper presents the main findings of a quantitative evaluation of the Red de Protección Social (RPS), a conditional cash transfer program in Nicaragua, against its primary objectives.

The authors evaluate the size of the welfare losses from using alternative “imperfect” welfare indicators as substitutes for the conventionally preferred consumption indicator.

Cash transfer programs induce multiplier effects when recipients put the money they receive to work to generate additional income. The ultimate income effects are multiples of the amounts transferred.

The authors set out a general equilibrium model for the evaluation of a domestically financed transfer program, which helps to combine the results from a computable general equilibrium model with disaggregated household data.Using a Mexican cash t

The paper shows how the so-called distributional characteristic of a policy instrument can be additively decomposed into two components; one that captures the targeting efficiency of the instrument, the other its redistributive efficiency.

In this paper we investigate whether a conditional cash transfer program such as the Programa Nacional de Educación, Salud y Alimentación (PROGRESA) can simultaneously combat the problems of low school attendance and child work.

This report provides an evaluation of the community level effects of PROGRESA using household level data from various rounds of PROGRESA's evaluation sample (the ENCEL surveys).