Conditional Cash Transfers in Bolivia: Origins, Impact, and Universality James W. McGuire Department of Government Wesleyan University
[email protected] APRIL 2, 2013 Paper prepared for the 2013 Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association, San Francisco, April 3-6, 2013. Word Count: 12,650 (without footnotes), 17,455 (with footnotes) Abstract Bolivia's conditional cash transfer programs (CCTs), the Bono Juancito Pinto (2006- ) for schoolchildren and the Bono Juana Azurduy (2009- ) for expectant and new mothers and their infants, are described and compared to CCTs elsewhere in Latin America. The paper (1) inventories the political forces that gave rise to the programs; (2) finds that the Bolivian CCTs have not been very successful; (3) attributes the programs' deficiencies mainly to flaws in the public provision of education, health care, and documentation; (4) identifies reasons why the programs were designed to be universal rather than means- tested; and (5) argues that despite the low impact of the Bolivian CCT programs -- which would be hard to improve through means-testing -- other countries with high poverty headcounts might well benefit from introducing universal rather than means-tested CCTs. 1 Between 1989 and 2010 the governments of seventeen Latin American countries introduced conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs, which involve the periodic transfer of money from the state to families that meet certain conditions: typically that children go to school and to health clinics; often that expectant mothers get prenatal care and trained attendance at birth; and sometimes that family members attend workshops. In 2010 these programs served about 129 million people in seventeen Latin American countries.1 Studies suggest that many of these programs have improved the uptake of basic education and health services, reduced child labor, and diminished income poverty and income inequality.