Alleviating extreme poverty in Chile: the short term effects of Chile Solidario

This paper evaluates the effect of an anti-poverty program, Chile Solidario, during its first two years of operation. We find that the program tends to increases significantly their take-up of cash assistance programs and of social programs for housing and employment, and to improve education and health outcomes for participating households. There is no evidence that the participation to employment program translates into improved employment or income outcomes in the short term. Finally, we provide suggestive evidence of the key role that the psycho-social support had in enabling this change, by increasing awareness of social services in the community as well as households’ orientation towards the future.Program evaluation, Matching estimators, Extreme poverty, Chile.

Improving nutritional status through behavioral change : lessons from Madagascar

This paper provides evidence of the effects of a large-scale intervention that focuses on the quality of nutritional and child care inputs during the early stages of life. The empirical strategy uses a combination of double-difference and weighting estimators in a longitudinal survey to address the purposive placement of participating communities and estimate the effect of the availability of the program at the community level on nutritional outcomes. The authors find that the program helped 0-5 year old children in the participating communities to bridge the gap in weight for age z-scores and the incidence of underweight. The program also had significant effects in protecting long-term nutritional outcomes (height for age z-scores and incidence of stunting) against an underlying negative trend in the absence of the program. Importantly, the effect of the program exhibits substantial heterogeneity: gains in nutritional outcomes are larger for more educated mothers and for villages with better infrastructure. The program enables the analysis to isolate responsiveness to information provision and disentangle the effect of knowledge in the education effect on nutritional outcomes. The results are suggestive of important complementarities among child care, maternal education, and community infrastructure.Population Policies,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Early Child and Children's Health,Housing&Human Habitats,Nutrition

Social protection in a crisis - Argentina's Plan Jefes y Jefas

The authors assess the impact of Argentina's main social policy response to the severe economic crisis of 2002. The program aimed to provide direct income support for families with dependents, for whom the head had become unemployed due to the crisis. Counterfactual comparisons are based on a matched subset of applicants not yet receiving the program. Panel data spanning the crisis are also used. The authors find that the program reduced aggregate unemployment, though it attracted as many people into the workforce from inactivity, as it did people who would have been otherwise unemployed. While there was substantial leakage to formally ineligible families, and incomplete coverage of those eligible, the program did partially compensate many losers from the crisis, and reduced extreme poverty.Environmental Economics&Policies,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Health Economics&Finance,Poverty Monitoring&Analysis,Services&Transfers to Poor,Poverty Monitoring&Analysis,Environmental Economics&Policies,Health Economics&Finance,Services&Transfers to Poor,Rural Poverty Reduction

Distributional outcomes of a decentralized welfare program

It is common for central governments, to delegate authority over the targeting of welfare programs to local community organizations - which may be better informed about who is poor, though possibly less accountable for getting the money to the local poor - while the center retains control over how much goes to each local region. The authors outline a theoretical model of the interconnected behavior of the various actors in such a setting. The model's information structure provides scope for econometric identification. Applying data for a specific program in Bangladesh, they find that overall targeting was mildly pro-poor, mostly because of successful targeting within villages. But this varied across villages. Although some village characteristics promoted better targeting, these were generally not the same characteristics that attracted resources from the center. The authors observe that the center's desire for broad geographic coverage, appears to have severely constrained the scope for pro-poor village targeting. However, poor villages tended not to be better at reaching their poor. They find some evidence that local institutions matter. The presence of cooperatives for farmers and the landless, appears to be associated with more pro-poor program targeting. The presence of recreational clubs has the opposite effect. Sometimes the benefits of decentralized social programs are captured by local elites, depending on the type of spending being decentralized. When public spending us on private (excludable) good, and there is no self-targeting mechanism to ensure that only the poor participate, there is ample scope for local mis-targeting.Services&Transfers to Poor,Poverty Impact Evaluation,Poverty Reduction Strategies,Environmental Economics&Policies,Poverty Monitoring&Analysis,Safety Nets and Transfers,Rural Poverty Reduction,Services&Transfers to Poor,Governance Indicators,Poverty Impact Evaluation

Assisting the transition from workfare to work : a randomized experiment

Randomly sampled workfare participants in a welfare-dependent region of Argentina were given a voucher that entitled an employer to a sizable wage subsidy. A second sample also received the option of skill training, while a third sample formed the control group. The authors analyze the effects of this scheme on participants'employment and income, using double-difference and instrumental-variables methods to dealwith potential experimental biases, including selective compliance with the randomized assignment. The authors find that compared with the control group, voucher recipients had a significantly higher probability of employment, though their current incomes were no higher. The impact was largely confined to women and younger workers. Labor supply effects appear to have been important. However, training had no significant impact. The experiment was cost-effective in reducing the government's welfare spending, since take-up of the subsidy by employers was low.Poverty Impact Evaluation,Labor Policies,Labor Standards,Environmental Economics&Policies,Public Health Promotion,Environmental Economics&Policies,Labor Standards,Poverty Impact Evaluation,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Tertiary Education

Do workfare participants recover quickly from retrenchment?

What happens to participants in a workfare program--a program that imposes work requirements on welfare recipients--when that program is cut? The authors compare the incomes of workfare participants in Argentina to those of nonparticipants and past participants after a severe contraction in aggregate outlays on the program. The authors find evidence of partial income replacement, such that those who left the program were able to make up one quarter of the gross workfare wage within six months. This rises to half in 12 months. The estimates are unbiased in the presence of time-invariant errors from mismatching in the selection of the comparison group. Fully removing selection bias would probably yield even lower income replacement. Test results based on a second follow-up survey that valid inferences can be drawn about program impacts from the authors'measures of income replacement.Health Economics&Finance,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,BD-Lcg Activities For Bd -- 2031288,Poverty Monitoring&Analysis,Poverty Impact Evaluation,Poverty Monitoring&Analysis,TF054599-PHRD-KYRGYZ REPUBLIC: WATER MANAGEMENT IMPROVEMENT PROJECT,Health Economics&Finance,Civic Participation and Corporate Governance,BD-Lcg Activities For Bd -- 2031288

Role of hormones in the regulation of RACK1 expression as a signaling checkpoint in immunosenescence

Immunosenescence defines the decline in immune function that occurs with aging. This has been associated, at least in part, with defective cellular signaling via protein kinase C (PKC) signal transduction pathways. Our data suggest reduced PKC activation and consequently reduced response to lipopolysaccharide (LPS) stimulation and cytokine release. The lack of PKC activation seems to be dependent on the reduced expression of the receptor for activated C kinase 1 (RACK1), a scaffolding protein involved in multiple signal transduction cascades. The defective expression of RACK1 may be dependent on age-related alteration of the balance between the adrenal hormones cortisol and dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA). DHEA levels reduce with aging, while cortisol levels remain substantially unchanged, resulting in an overall increase in the cortisol:DHEA ratio. These hormonal changes are significant in the context of RACK1 expression and signaling function because DHEA administration in vivo and in vitro can restore the levels of RACK1 and the function of the PKC signaling cascade in aged animals and in human cells. In contrast, there is evidence that cortisol can act as a negative transcriptional regulator of RACK1 expression. The rack1 gene promoter contains a glucocorticoid responsive element that is also involved in androgen signaling. Furthermore DHEA may have an indirect influence on the post-transcriptional regulation of the functions of the glucocorticoid receptor. In this review, we will examine the role of the hormonal regulation of rack1 gene transcriptional regulation and the consequences on signaling and function in immune cells and immunosenescence

Expression Profiling and Functional Implications of a Set of Zinc Finger

Articular chondrocytes are responsible for the maintenance of healthy articulations; indeed, dysregulation of their functions, including the production of matrix proteins and matrix-remodeling proteases, may result in fraying of the tissue and development of osteoarthritis (OA). To explore transcriptional mechanisms that contribute to the regulation of chondrocyte homeostasis and may be implicated in OA development, we compared the gene expression profile of a set of zinc finger proteins potentially linked to the control of chondrocyte differentiation and/or functions (ZNF423, ZNF470, ZNF521, and ZNF780B) in chondrocytes from patients affected by OA and from subjects not affected by OA. This analysis highlighted a significantly lower expression of the transcript encoding ZNF423 in chondrocytes from OA, particularly in elderly patients. Interestingly, this decrease was mirrored by the similarly reduced expression of PPAR , a known target of ZNF423 with anti-inflammatory and chondroprotective properties. The ZNF521 mRNA instead was abundant in all primary chondrocytes studied; the RNAi-mediated silencing of this gene significantly altered the COL2A/COL1 expression ratio, associated with the maintenance of the differentiated phenotype, in chondrocytes cultivated in alginate beads. These results suggest a role for ZNF423 and ZNF521 in the regulation of chondrocyte homeostasis and warrant further investigations to elucidate their mechanism of action