"Studies have shown that malnourished children in developing countries score lower on tests of cognitive function and fail to acquire fine motor skills at the normal rate.

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.

One of the common criticisms of poverty alleviation programs is that the high share of administrative (nontransfer) costs substantially reduces the programs’ impact on poverty. But very little empirical evidence exists on program costs.

While ample evidence documents that urban children generally have better nutritional status than their rural counterparts, recent research suggests that urban malnutrition is on the rise.

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.

This study documents how poor small-scale farmers in lowland tropical Mexico use improved maize germplasm and how this contributes to their well-being.

This paper as exemplified by the Millennium Declaration of the United Nations, the reduction of poverty and hunger are now seen as central objectives of international development. Yet the modalities for attaining these goals are contested.

This study investigates the effects of childcare on work and earnings of mothers in poor neighborhoods of Guatemala City.

This study analyzes work, childcare arrangements, and earnings of mothers in the poor neighborhoods of Guatemala City and Greater Accra, Ghana, two urban areas where formal- and informal-sector work differ in importance.

High urbanization rates in Latin America are accompanied by an increase in women’s participation in the labor force and the number of households headed by single mothers.

This paper is concerned with the issue of the most cost-effective way of improving access to education for poor households in developing countries.

The authors use individual observations from a panel of families during the period of the peso crisis in Mexico to investigate whether and how labor market shocks, as proxied by changes in the gender- and age-specific unemployment rates in the met

Household food security is an important measure of well-being.

Data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) for five Latin American countries (seven data sets) were used to explore the feasibility of creating a composite feeding index and to examine the association between feeding practices and child he

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.