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The economic environment in Latin America has not shown signs of substantial improvement after suffering the ravages of the pandemic. In this context of rising inflation and deteriorating working conditions, a recent study recommends protecting social programs from direct transfers, particularly those that condition the payment of money to low-income families to the fulfillment of their children’s health and educational goals.
In the last 20 years, these government plans —focused on the most vulnerable groups— have prevented the deaths of almost 740,000 lives of infants under 5 years of age in Brazil, Mexico and Ecuador (a 24% drop in mortality), according to a study by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) of the la Caixa Foundation.
The more consolidated and monitored the programs are, the better results they will provide, the main researchers of the project told América Futura. This is how, in the municipalities where they detected greater coverage, they also identified a lower incidence of diseases related to poverty such as diarrhea, malnutrition, tuberculosis, malaria or HIV/AIDS, among others.
“It was important to identify the return of politics”, explains Davide Rasella, ISGlobal researcher and coordinator of the analysis. “But the objective was the future, because we are in a world of polycrisis, of extreme vulnerability; We are experiencing the 3C crisis: the climate, the conflict in Ukraine and the post-covid crisis. Also, inflation is rising.”
Despite having experienced a slight improvement in living conditions as of 2021, when the lockdowns began to be relaxed, the region has not yet resumed its pre-pandemic growth rate, according to the alert late last year. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). At least 201 million people live in poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean, or 32% of the population. Of these, some 82 million (13%) face extreme poverty, that is, they are unable to cover vital basic needs such as health, education, food or housing.
ECLAC even called on States to urgently address the situation “to avoid the risk of a lost generation.”
fiscal austerity
The retrospective study analyzed health and education results produced in the last 20 years by three programs: Bolsa Familiar in Brazil, Bono de Desarrollo Humano in Ecuador, and progress in Mexico. The latter no longer exists since 2018.
In addition, the researchers used the data to make forecasts for the future. For example, in a medium crisis scenario, expanding the coverage of the plans to include the “new poor” would reduce infant mortality by up to 17% and avoid 153,601 infant deaths in the three countries. “We need to protect people in vulnerable situations, preferably with conditional transfers to provide more complete support for social programs,” added Daniella Medeiros, a researcher at the Federal University of Bahia and first author of the study.
“We know that increasing the coverage of social programs means more costs for governments, but we are talking about lives, about fundamental rights,” Medeiros stressed.
gender impact
Social assistance programs are often used as banners in political campaigns. Therefore, they undergo changes in methodology or are suppressed outright when the rulers change. In the case of Mexico, the Progresa program, which was established in 1997, was eradicated in 2018 when Andrés Manuel López Obrador became president. The president replaced it with a dozen direct transfer plans, although some no longer exist.
For the researchers, the main difference between direct and conditional transfers is that in the second case “the money has to be spent, basically, on childcare,” explains Carlos Chivardi, a researcher at the University of York and another study author. “From the design, these programs were thought, yes, to combat poverty, but mainly so as not to perpetuate poverty.” And hence, his emphasis on infants.
In addition, for this same reason, the survey found that these programs also have an impact on improving gender conditions in low-income families, since women (the main caregivers) are usually the primary beneficiaries of the transfers.
“The design and implementation of these social programs was based on transfers to homes, but specifically to women. Because there are many studies of evidence, particularly in the case of Mexico, which indicate that women make better use of resources, compared to men”, Chivardi pointed out.
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