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Abstract:
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This paper presents the results of a three-year evaluation performed on the first
cohorts of Chile Solidario, the most important anti-poverty program in Chile.
The paper presents a description of the program, emphasizing the mechanism
by which people were admitted into the program. We then propose evaluation
strategies and discuss their validity. The final evaluation is conducted using a
Matching estimator, and we discuss the principles surrounding the potential for
this to be a valid evaluation method. The initial results using the Chile Solidario
Panel suggest that the program had positive effects on psychosocial welfare
and on take-up of subsidies and social programs. However, it is not possible to
obtain reliable results due to data shortcomings, particularly the lack of baseline
data. In order to solve the problem, we generated a database using six years
of administrative data, including around 1,000,000 family records per year.
A method for overcoming the treatment substitution problem is discussed and
implemented. Results are much more robust than those of the Chile Solidario
Panel and show small, but clearly positive effects for several variables, especially
the number of workers in the family, the percentage of workers in the family and
the employment of the head of the family. |