Poverty & Social Development: A Caribbean Perspective

The Experience of Conditional Cash

Transfers in Latin America and the

Caribbean

In this study published by the FAO, two researchers examine the effectiveness of Conditional Cash Transfers (CCT) in their impacts on household welfares and rural development.

By comparing six programs underway in the region, namely for: Honduras, Nicaragua, Jamaica, Colombia, Brazil and Mexico, the authors lay-out their analysis within the contexts of national policies, and their alignments with strategies to reduce poverty, and foster human capital development. And viewed from a critical perspective, they scrutinize the dynamics behind the process of Demand-Side Subsidy, and their real impacts when setting in motion strategies for educational development, or level of school attendance in rural and deprived urban areas. These points leading to the question: “Is There a Development Bottleneck?”

*Sudhanshu Handa and Benjamin Davis, FAO, ESA Working Paper No. 06-O7, May 2006.