Thursday, July 29, 2010

Conditional Cash Transfers

The new edition of The Economist contains a pair of articles that are worth your time. (You can find them here and here.) They're short and they address issues of incentives, income distribution, productive resources and economic development.

The focus of the articles is a relatively new idea in economic development programs, conditional cash transfers (or CCTs). The idea is that the poor are paid for certain activities: getting their children vaccinated or making sure their children are in school. It appears to be successful in many areas, although it is more successful in rural areas than in urban areas.

While I'm not sure to what extent you address economic development (that's an "end-of-the-course" topic that too frequently gets left out, either for lack of time, lack of interest, or lack of understanding); I do suspect you discuss incentives, and possibly income distribution or productive resources. I would be interested in your assessment of these articles.

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