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The Impact of Bolsa Família on Poverty: Does Brazil’s Conditional Cash Transfer Program Have a Rural Bias?
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Higgins, Sean Gordon |
| Copyright Year | 2012 |
| Abstract | An important dimension in assessing any anti-poverty program is to know how it affects the living standards of different subgroups of the poor. "is paper examines the impact of Brazil’s conditional cash transfer program on poverty in urban and rural areas, formally testing the hypothesis that the program has a rural bias because its eligibility cut-off and transfer size are not adjusted for spatial price differences. Grosh et al. (2008) argue that a program that does not adjust its eligibility cut-off for spatial price differences will be biased toward the rural poor because they face a lower cost of living. Fiszbein and Schady (2009) find that eligible families in urban areas are less likely to participate in Bolsa Familia, which they attribute to self-exclusion due to the cost of living differential and the implicitly lower value of the transfer in cities. Although the authors suggest that Bolsa Familia might have a rural bias, no study has rigorously compared its impact in urban and rural areas.* Regional price differences are not negligible in Brazil: the Laspeyres price index based on the cost of food and housing, indexed to 1.000 for metropolitan Sao Paulo, is 0.447 in the rural Northeast region.1 In other words, the cost of living in Sao Paulo is more than twice the cost of living in the rural Northeast. "e real value of Bolsa Familia’s eligibility cut-off and the purchasing power of the transfer are therefore significantly higher in more rural states than in Sao Paulo. "is paper first presents a counterfactual static incidence analysis to determine the impact of Bolsa Familia in 2009, using |
| Starting Page | 88 |
| Ending Page | 125 |
| Page Count | 38 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.7916/D8B27S8K |
| Volume Number | 23 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.helvidius.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Higgins.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.7916/D8B27S8K |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
