Study Overview
In an effort to improve the circumstances in which children from poor families start out life, the Mexican government has spent considerable resources developing an anti-poverty program called PROGRESA. In this paper, I investigate the impact of PROGRESA on child health outcomes including morbidity, height, and anemia. The analysis takes advantage of a controlled randomized design.
Study Results
I found a significant improvement in the health of children in response to PROGRESA. Specifically, children born during the two-year intervention to families benefiting from the program experienced an illness rate in the first six months of life that was 25.3 percent lower than that of control children. Treatment children aged 0-35 months at baseline experienced a reduction of 39.5 percent in their illness rates after 24 months in the program. Moreover, the effect of the program seems to increase the longer the children stayed on the program, suggesting that program benefits were cumulative. I also found that treatment children were 25.3 percent less likely to be anemic and grew about 1 centimeter more during the first year of the program