Luis Rubalcava

EVALUATING CONDITIONAL SCHOOLING AND HEALTH PROGRAMS

We analyze in this chapter the development and evaluation of a new genre of social programs termed conditional cash transfer programs which have become widespread across Latin America and are now extending outside the region. Conditional transfer programs typically link monetary transfers to human capital investment, generally education, health or a combination of both. These transfer programs are considered innovative because they condition the receipt of monetary benefits on such behaviors as regular school attendance and preventive clinic visits. Effectively they are a subsidy to schooling and health, reducing the shadow price of human capital acquisition. We focus here primarily on a case study of Progresa (the Education, Health and Nutrition Program), a Mexican anti-poverty program which has served as a model for the implementation of conditional programs in other countries, and on which most evidence exists on impacts. We also review results from the newer conditional cash transfer programs. The chapter thus analyzes what we know about the success of conditional cash transfer programs as a mechanism for reducing poverty and identifies what research which is still needed in order for broader conclusions to be drawn.

Migrant networks and pathways to child obesity in Mexico.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: 1) to assess the link between migrant networks and becoming overweight or obese and 2) to explore the pathways by which migrant networks may contribute to the increasing overweight and obese population of children in Mexico. Using two waves of the Mexican Family Life Survey (MxFLS), we find that children and adolescents (ages 3 to 15) living in households with migrant networks are at an increased risk of becoming overweight or obese over the period of observation, relative to their peers with no migrant networks. Sedentary behavior and household-level measures of economic wellbeing explain some of the association between networks and changes in weight status, but the role of extended networks remains significant. Community-level characteristics related to migration do not account for any of the observed relationship between household-level networks and becoming overweight or obese.

The Consequences of Migration to the United States for Short-Term Changes in the Health of Mexican Immigrants

Although many studies have attempted to examine the consequences of Mexico-U.S. migration for Mexican immigrants’ health, few have had adequate data to generate the appropriate comparisons. In this article, we use data from two waves of the Mexican Family Life Survey (MxFLS) to compare the health of current migrants from Mexico with those of earlier migrants and nonmigrants. Because the longitudinal data permit us to examine short-term changes in health status subsequent to the baseline survey for current migrants and for Mexican residents, as well as to control for the potential health selectivity of migrants, the results provide a clearer picture of the consequences of immigration for Mexican migrant health than have previous studies. Our findings demonstrate that current migrants are more likely to experience recent changes in health status—both improvements and declines—than either earlier migrants or nonmigrants. The net effect, however, is a decline in health for current migrants: compared with never migrants, the health of current migrants is much more likely to have declined in the year or two since migration and not significantly more likely to have improved. Thus, it appears that the migration process itself and/or the experiences of the immediate post-migration period detrimentally affect Mexican immigrants’ health.

Schooling Inequality and Language Barriers

This article estimates the impact of language barriers on school achievement and the potential ameliorating role of bilingual education. Using large household data sets from poor rural communities in Mexico, we find that parental language (failure to speak Spanish) represents an important barrier to the schooling of indigenous children. We provide an empirical test suggesting that this largely reflects parental human capital related to culture/language, rather than unobserved wealth effects. Using double difference estimators with community fixed effects to address endogenous program placement, we demonstrate that schools with bilingual education narrow the gap in the educational performance of children with monolingual mothers versus bilingual and nonindigenous mothers.

Schooling Inequality Among the Indigenous: A Problem of Resources or Language Barriers?

Using large household data sets from rural Mexican communities, where a majority of indigenous people live, we analyze the potential explanatory factors for low educational attainment of indigenous children. We find that, overall, indigenous children fare worse than their non-indigenous classmates. Nevertheless, there is important heterogeneity within the indigenous group. In particular, monolingual indigenous children (those who speak only an indigenous language) perform much worse in school than bilingual indigenous children who speak Spanish as a second language.

The impact of education and health heterogeneity on Generational Support Ratios: a cross-national comparison between Mexico and Korea

ABSTRACT Policy makers are concerned about the socio-economic consequences of population ageing. Policies often rely on estimations of support ratios based solely on the population age structure. We estimate Generational Support Ratios (GSRs) considering health heterogeneity of the population age 60+ and education heterogeneity of their offspring. We explore the effect of a public policy that changes the education of a targeted sub-group of women when they are young on their health once they become older, taking into account changes in demographic processes (i.e. marriage, fertility, offsprings education). We used the model presented by Kye et al. for the Korean context and examine the Mexican context. Our paper has three objectives. First, by applying this framework to the Mexican context we aim to find that improvements in womens education may mitigate the negative consequences of population ageing directly and indirectly through subsequent demographic behaviours that altogether affect GSRs. Second, by making a cross-national comparison between Korea and Mexico, we aim to quantify how policies of educational expansion have different impacts in contexts in which the population age 60+ have universal access to health care compared to contexts in which access to health care is selective. Third, by comparing cross-nationally we aim to show how differences in family processes across countries alter the pathways through which improvements in education affect GSRs.