Welfare conditionality in Latin America's conditional cash transfers: Models and trends

Abstract

To what extent have Latin America's Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs adopted different forms of conditionality? What are the main features of this variation, if any? In this article, we show that conditionalities vary across Latin America's CCTs and across time within programs. Drawing on existing conceptualizations of welfare conditionality and a novel, purpose-built dataset covering 16 countries from 1997 to 2019, we analyze the evolution and variation in the design of welfare conditionality in the region. We find that conditionalities among Latin America's CCTs exhibit many different types and also vary significantly in how the program's main attributes—behavioral requirements, monitoring, and sanctioning rules—combine and evolve across time in each program. These combinations show that governments do not consistently produce “pure” CCT models but instead use conditionality features in many different ways and also adjust them over time, frequently to make more explicit what they expect from CCT recipients.