2014年-世界发展银行全球_Childrens_Health_Opportunities_and_Project_Evaluation___Mexicos_Oportunidades_Program_29页_518kb

Summary of "Children's Health Opportunities and Project Evaluation: Mexico's Oportunidades Program"

Core Content

This paper introduces a new methodology for evaluating social projects, specifically focusing on the impact of conditional cash transfer programs on children's health opportunities. The method is applied to analyze the effects of Mexico's Oportunidades program, one of the largest conditional cash transfer programs in the world, on the health outcomes of children aged two to six years. The evaluation is based on the distribution of health outcomes and considers the circumstances for which individuals are not responsible, such as parental education level and indigenous background.

Main Points

• The Oportunidades program was initiated in 1998 and provides bimonthly cash transfers to poor rural households in exchange for participation in health, education, and nutrition activities.
• The program has substantial positive effects on the health opportunities of children from indigenous families, particularly in the lower parts of the distribution.
• For nonindigenous families, the positive effects are weaker but still significant.
• The evaluation focuses on stochastic dominance (first-order and second-order) to assess whether the program improves opportunities rather than just average outcomes.

Key Information

Program Overview

• Oportunidades is a conditional cash transfer program targeting poor rural households.
• It requires compliance with preventive health care, nutrition, education, and monitoring.
• Approximately 5.8 million families participated in 2010, with $4.8 billion in cash transfers.
• The program has a strong focus on breaking the intergenerational poverty cycle.

Methodology

• The evaluation uses conditional cumulative distribution functions (CDFs) to assess the impact on health opportunities.
• The paper proposes a stochastic dominance test to determine if the program improves opportunities for children based on their parental circumstances.
• The null hypothesis is nondominance, and the alternative hypothesis is dominance.
• Propensity score matching is used to ensure comparability between treatment and control groups based on preprogram characteristics.

Circumstances and Outcomes

• Circumstances (uncontrollable by individuals) include:
  • Indigenous background
  • Parental education level
  • Program participation
• Responsibility characteristics (controllable by individuals) include:
  • Health investments in children

Stochastic Dominance

• First-order stochastic dominance implies that the program improves opportunities for all levels of health outcomes.
• Second-order stochastic dominance implies that the program improves opportunities for lower levels of health outcomes, even if it does not for all levels.
• The Roemer identification axiom is used to assume that children at the same percentile of their type distribution have comparable responsibility, allowing for a fair comparison of health outcomes.

Contributions to the Literature

1. Focus on children's health opportunities: The paper evaluates the impact of the program on children's health, which is critical for their future outcomes.
2. Use of stochastic dominance: The methodology applies stochastic dominance to evaluate inequality of opportunity, not just average treatment effects.
3. Improvement in evaluation techniques: The approach uses Davidson and Duclos (2009) to test for dominance, which allows for statistical inference and identification of the maximal range of dominance.

Sample Design and Challenges

• The treatment and control samples were randomly assigned at the locality level.
• 506 localities were selected for the study, with 320 receiving immediate treatment and 186 receiving delayed treatment.
• A new control sample was constructed after the delayed treatment began to ensure comparability with the treatment sample.
• Matching at the local level is not sufficient; household-level matching is also important.
• There are data limitations, including sample attrition, partial health data collection, and household identifier issues, which may affect the comparability of the samples.

Conclusion

• The paper concludes that the Oportunidades program significantly improves the health opportunities of indigenous children, particularly in the lower parts of the distribution.
• The methodology provides a robust framework for evaluating the equality of opportunity in social programs.
• The use of stochastic dominance tests offers a more nuanced understanding of how social programs affect different segments of the population.

References to Related Work

• The paper builds on the equality of opportunity literature, including contributions by Bossert, Fleurbaey, and Roemer.
• It references previous studies on conditional cash transfers, such as Fiszbein et al. (2009), and stochastic dominance approaches by Verme (2010) and Naschold and Barrett (2010).
• The propensity score matching technique is adapted from average treatment effect literature to better compare treatment and control types.

JEL Codes

• I18: Health; health care; health insurance
• I38: Government policy
• D63: Equity; equality; inequality; and Lorenz dominance

Summary of Findings

• The treatment group (Oportunidades participants) shows substantial improvements in health opportunities for indigenous children.
• Nonindigenous children also benefit, but to a lesser extent.
• The methodology allows for statistical testing of stochastic dominance, which is more informative than average treatment effects.
• The sample design and matching procedures are crucial for accurate evaluation, but data limitations may affect the results.