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Assessing the Effect of Conditional Cash Transfers in Children Chronic Stunting: The Human Development Bonus in Ecuador
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Analiti a, Revista de análisis estadístico, Vol. 13 (1), 2017
of the ratio of height for age from a distribution of well-nourished children) can be paired to
an indicator of structural poverty, evidences room for prioritised empirical research.
One particular interesting case is the Ecuadorian programme
Bono de Desarrollo Humano
(BDH) or Human Development Bonus, launched in 2003. Similar to others, this CCT
allocates the transfer depending on a score that determines household eligibility status. The
BDH has been evaluated on several outcomes, being stunting one of the more understudied
mainly due to the lack of anthropometric information associated to recipient’s registries.
Indeed, even when stunting prevalence is an indicator of particular concern for Ecuador,
only two important studies can be reported. This evidenced gap, and a recent story of
intricate methodological and political transfer scheme changes, are strong indicatives of the
need of research.
In this context, and relying on a recent large-scale household living conditions survey
data, I outline a two-stage empirical strategy, attempting to answer if there is an effect to
the BDH in chronic stunting for children under 5 years. The first stage recurs to a multi-
variate analysis method, Categorical Principal Component Analysis (PCA), to replicate the
original eligibility index in the survey. Afterwards, and exploiting the discontinuities in the
administration of the programme, the second stage implements a Regression Discontinuity
in its fuzzy version, to estimate the effect.
This document is structured as follows; Section 2 reviews the main theoretical relations
between poverty, CCTs and children nutritional outcomes, and evidences Latin American
and Caribbean case studies results. Section 3 contextualizes the Ecuadorian BDH and spec-
ifies the motivation. Section 4 details data, methodological approach and implementation.
Then, Section 5 reports the main estimates and finally Section 6 outlines conclusions, dis-
cusses their validity and suggests further research.
2 Literature review
2.1 Poverty, malnutrition and Conditional Cash Transfers
Multiple causes have been cited as the root of the poverty-trap, being one of the more largely
documented an insufficient bad-quality diet. The first formal attempt to study the relation-
ship between poverty and malnutrition was made in 1957 by Leibenstein, and since then,
several theorisations have been developed (Dasgupta and Ray, 1987). The transversal idea
to these theories is that poor people eat on a surviving basis because of their constrained
budget; therefore, they cannot fully develop their capacities which makes them less produc-
tive, resulting in underpaid jobs, if hired at all. This diminished labour market participation
traduces in less resources to bring back home, perpetuating the cycle (Banarjee and Duflo,
2011).
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