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.

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 synthesizes the results of five studies using household panel data from Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Mali, Mexico and Russia, which examine the extent to which households are able through formal and/or informal arrangements to insure their con

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.

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.

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.

This paper assesses how the Programa Nacional de Educacion, Salud, y Alimentacion (PROGRESA) program has affected the school enrollment of Mexican youth in the first 15 months of its operation.

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).

The objective of this report is to conduct a re-evaluation of the targeting methods used by PROGRESA in light of the revisions adopted by the PROGRESA administration regarding how households are selected as eligible for PROGRESA benefits.