Does money matter? The effects of cash transfers on child development in rural Ecuador.

Does Money Matter? The Effects of Cash Transfers on Child Health and Development in Rural Ecuador

Does Money Matter

This paper examines how a government-run cash transfer program targeted to poor mothers in rural Ecuador influenced the health and development of their children. This program is of particular interest because, unlike other transfer programs that have been implemented recently in Latin America, receipt of the cash transfers was not conditioned on specific parental actions, such as taking childre...

Are Cash Transfers a Silver Bullet? Evidence from the Zambian Child Grant

Accumulated evidence from dozens of cash transfer programmes across the world suggest that there are few interventions that can match the range of impacts and cost-effectiveness of a small, predictable monetary transfer to poor families in developing countries. These results lead many policymakers to consider cash transfer programmes the ‘gold-standard’ in anti-poverty policy with some even adv...

Conditional Cash Transfers for Maternal Health Interventions: Factors Influencing Uptake in North-Central Nigeria

Background Nigeria accounts for a significant proportion of global maternal mortality figures with little progress made in curbing poor health indices. In a bid to reverse this trend, the Government of Nigeria initiated a conditional cash transfer (CCT) programme to encourage pregnant women utilize services at designated health facilities. This study aims to understand experiences of women who ...

Working Paper No . 2012 - 01 Wealthy , healthy , and wise : does money compensate for being born into difficult conditions ?

Recent studies have linked transfers from Mexican conditional cash transfer program Oportunidades (formerly PROGRESA) to improvements in child development (Fernald, Gertler, and Neufeld 2008, 2009) but this work has been criticized as failing to account for endogeneity of the transfers. We create an exogenous instrument for the amount of transfers and use it to test program and transfer effects...