危机时的社会保障：阿根廷的“家长”方案

Social Protection in a Crisis: Argentina's Plan Jefes y Jefas Emanuela Galasso and Martin Ravallion1 Development Research Group, World Bank, 1818 H Street NW, Washington DC Abstract: We 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. We 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. Keywords: Crisis; safety net; workfare; unemployment; poverty; Argentina JEL classifications: H53, I38; J65 World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 3165, November 2003 The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the view of the World Bank, its Executive Directors, or the countries they represent. Policy Research Working Papers are available online at http://econ.worldbank.org. 1 The work reported in this paper is part of the ex-post evaluation of the World Bank's Social Protection IV Project in Argentina. The authors' thanks go to staff of the government's Institute of Statistics and Ministry of Labor, who helped greatly in assembling the data required for this paper, and to the World Bank's manager for the project, Polly Jones, for her continuing support of the evaluation effort, and many useful discussions. Paula Giovagnoli provided excellent research assistance. Correspondence: egalasso@worldbank.org and mravallion@worldbank.org. 1  2  1. Introduction Income transfer programs are a common social policy response to macroeconomic crises. Stated aims vary in practice, but the common (explicit or implicit) goal is to help protect the living standards of those families most adversely affected by the crisis. One of the largest such programs in recent times is the Government of Argentina's Plan Jefes y Jefas (hereafter "Jefes"), introduced in January 2002. This was the main public safety net response to the severe economic and political crisis that hit Argentina at the end of 2001. Unemployment and poverty rates reached record levels during the crisis (World Bank, 2003). Jefes aimed to provide direct income support for families with dependents who had lost their main source of earnings due to the crisis. To assure that the program reached those in greatest need, work requirements were imposed. With support from a World Bank loan (and equivalent counterpart funds from the government), the program expanded rapidly to cover about two million households by late 2002.2 Our knowledge about the impacts of such programs has often been limited by a number of factors, including the speed with which crisis programs have to be scaled up and the paucity of appropriate survey data. Yet opinions still abound, often based on little more than casual anecdotes. In the case of Jefes, critics of the program have made claims about fraudulent participation, such as by pointing to cases of registered participants who do not appear to satisfy the program's eligibility criteria, or to weakness in the implementation/effectiveness of the program's counterpart work requirements. At the other extreme, it has been argued that the scheme was a big success in reducing poverty and unemployment in the aftermath of the crisis. 2 In 2002, the Government of Argentina spent about US$500 million on Jefes, and about a quarter of that was financed through a World Bank loan. For 2003, the estimate is US$600 million, of which the Bank loan will probably cover about 50%. The loan and counterpart funds cover mainly the payments to beneficiaries. Most costs for materials, supplies, etc. for the workfare projects are covered by the local governments or NGOs sponsoring the projects. 3  For example, by one assessment, Jefes is claimed to have accounted for the entire reduction in unemployment that was observed in the year following the crisis, which happened to roughly equal the increase in Jefes registrations over the same period (INDEC, 2002; World Bank, 2003). Such claims often rest on transparently weak foundations. Anecdotes of abuse may well attract attention but may not be a sound basis for generalization. And claims about (positive and negative) impact often ignore behavioral responses. For example, it is unlikely that a program such as Jefes would not affect labor force participation choices. Then it is unlikely that all participants would have otherwise been unemployed. Similarly, one will clearly overestimate the impact on poverty if one ignores the foregone earnings of workfare participants, who are unlikely to be entirely idle in the absence of the program. Fortunately, we are in an unusually good situation to rigorously study the impacts of the Jefes program, given that large household surveys were done just before the crisis, in October 2001, and one year later, in October 2002, and that the latter survey identified Jefes participants. Furthermore, one third of the October 2001 sample were followed up in the later survey round. This paper uses these survey data and the tools of non-experimental program evaluation to address the following (related) questions about the Jefes program: