After closely following the success of Vicente Fox's Oportunidades anti-poverty program in Mexico over the past decade, I was thrilled to see that Michael Bloomberg had pursued a similar approach for New York City. Opportunity NYC is a conditional cash transfer (CCT) program intended to alleviate poverty and change behaviors that propagate poverty while improving low-income residents' economic, health and education outcomes.
While I give Bloomberg, MDRC, Seedco and the rest of their team enormous props for actually daring to measure and report program outcomes, the results were lackluster. Particularly in light of the success CCT programs have had elsewhere. I'll continue to follow results but in the meantime some hypotheses about why an anti-poverty program could work so well in one context and not in another. If others have ideas, I would love to hear them.
1. Many participant children in Mexico - particularly in rural settings - who are not in school are frequently engaged in the family's productive activities (e.g., agriculture, domestic production) and helping to generate income. For these children to go to school --rather than work -- each day is likely an easier behavioral change than is going to school each day instead of passively staying at home.
2. Several of the health and education indicators were already remarkably high (e.g., how many participants have a primary care physician that they see annually) among the control population, leaving Opportunity NYC little room for impressive results.
3. The program is still young. We'll give them that....
4. ???
More to come....
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