“Developed versus underdeveloped.” On the world stage, there are few rivalries as iconic. From political battles on the United Nations Assembly Floor to accusations of international injustice, this conflict has long stirred the hearts of everyone, from human rights activists to the unreasonably rich. Yet despite this symbolic clash of global inequality, the two sides actually have quite a few things in common. One of these is a desire to see improvement in the fields of poverty, education, and healthcare. Perhaps not coincidentally, these three topics are considered to be essential for human and country overall happiness. In developing countries, Conditional Cash Transfer Programs (CCTs) are often used to achieve desired results in those categories. CCTs are programs where the government essentially subsides actions that ordinary civilians can take to promote the state’s best interest. These programs are used in developing countries to boost several vital statistics. Still, it’s largely disputed if they would be useful in developed countries that don’t need to incentivize people to do things as they already mandate them. A good example of this would be Brazil using its CCT program “Bolsa Familia” to get kids to go to school, while in the United States, it’s already compulsory.
Whenever interventions, such as CCTs, have their usefulness brought into question, they are often subject to intense research to find objective and quantitative answers to people’s inquiries. Luckily enough, New York City created a CCT program called Family Rewards to incentivize employee status, health insurance, and education. In its overview, the program had a stated goal of lowering poverty, increasing education, expanding healthcare access, and shedding light upon the effectiveness of CCTs in New York and America as a whole. The results were outstanding. While a few small things needed to be changed, such as fewer incentives, the program’s 22 subsidized actions saw growth in nearly every category. In the research study, analyzers mentioned that underlying issues led to certain topics being less affected by the programs by others, but in perhaps another setting, would see substantial improvement. For example, New York already has incredibly high health insurance coverage rates, so just because not many people got health insurance under the Family Rewards program does not mean the program failed. About 48% of the costs actually went towards actually paying families, while the other 52% went towards administrative costs. Despite this, the social costs of the impact made by these programs are estimated to break fairly over even with the fiscal costs of the program. For example, as can be seen with the whole “expanding hospice care” debate, people not getting checkups and preventing severe disease can heavily cost completely unrelated patients (who the government sometimes pays for) for complex economic reasons I won’t get into today.
Family Rewards’ overall goal of decreasing poverty was particularly successful, as the program reduced the number of families living in poverty by 11%. It also cut extreme poverty rates (as defined by NYC) nearly in half. It also increased the likelihood that parents had bank accounts by 22%. Bank accounts are seen to be a critical step in the economic sustainability that these programs are often used to create. When it comes to education, the results were mixed for younger students, but it was surprisingly effective for high school students. Student repeaters were cut back upon, and attendance rates soared. For the health sector, Family Rewards increased families’ consistency of health insurance coverage by a little, but the city already had spectacular coverage rates (as aforementioned). Other medical statistics were touched upon, including dental work, but they are quite specific and weren’t even directly planned to be impacted by these programs in the first place. The workforce statistics were more mixed but generally positive. For the sake of legibility, I won’t delve into those numbers.
Overall, CCT’s have long been proven to be powerful tools of welfare to combat poverty and other issues in the developing world. For once, the developed world can learn a vital lesson here and use these programs for themselves. While it may be hard politically, New York City’s Family Rewards lays bare how cost-effective and efficient CCT programs can be in eliminating core issues plaguing American society. With recent problems like an 11.6% poverty rate and sudden risks in healthcare, we may be well overdue for some new interventions and policies to apply domestically.
Discussion Questions
What are other ways developed countries can learn from developing countries and vice versa?
CCTs were created by developing countries. What does this show about the strengths of co-existence and cooperation rather than the weaknesses?
Works Cited
Miller, C., Riccio, J., Verma, N. et al. Testing a conditional cash transfer program in the U.S.: the effects of the family rewards program in New York City. IZA J Labor Policy 4, 11 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40173-015-0037-6
Riccio, James. “Sharing Lessons from the First Conditional Cash Transfer Program
in the United States.” National Poverty Center, UMichigan, 22 Sept. 2010,
file:///C:/Users/Samma/Downloads/policybrief22.pdf. Accessed 7 Dec. 2022.
Gopinathan, Nishanth. Hope Sculpture in New York. website.
Creamer, John, et al. “Poverty in the United States: 2021.” United States Census
Bureau, United States Census, 13 Sept. 2022, www.census.gov/library/
publications/2022/demo/
p60-277.html#:~:text=Highlights-,Official%20Poverty%20Measure,37.9%20million%20pe
ople%20in%20poverty. Accessed 7 Dec. 2022.
Tan H, Luo J, Zhang M. Higher Education, Happiness, and Residents’ Health. Front Psychol. 2020 Jul 21;11:1669. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01669. PMID: 32849017; PMCID: PMC7396533.
Press, Associated. “Americans are the unhappiest they’ve been in 50 years, poll
finds.” NBC News, Comcast, 16 June 2020, www.nbcnews.com/politics/
politics-news/
americans-are-unhappiest-they-ve-been-50-years-poll-finds-n1231153.
Accessed 7 Dec. 2022.
1 Comment
Nicholas Caputo · January 5, 2023 at 7:05 pm
In response to the first topic question I feel that it is many times that developing countries are learning from already developed countries. Generally speaking many newer or smaller countries copy what bigger longer existing countries. For example many of law practices used in England are used in the United States due to the US using many of the same rules from its former parent country. In the case of CCTs for smaller countries it may work in the sense that it might be easier to manage but in the case of New York it really surprised me that a huge metropolitan city was able to see such great results. This would be the opposite of the example I gave before of a larger much more developed country ie the US learning from a country like Brazil.
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