The Government of Costa Rica collaborated with a research team to conduct a randomized controlled trial of their Working Children and Adolescents program. The program provided working youth with a monthly cash transfer with the conditions that they attend school regularly and complete their grade. This study examines the effect of the cash transfer on (1) child labor and hazardous child labor participation as well as hours worked; (2) school enrollment, attendance, and completion; and (3) self‐reported health. The main findings provide evidence of a statistically significant reduction of more than 4 hours worked per week by children. The findings also suggest null effects on labor participation and school outcomes. Cost‐effectiveness analysis shows that the program demonstrates a transfer effectiveness and cost‐effectiveness comparable to similar interventions in Latin American countries. The subsidy alone does not seem enough to improve schooling outcomes, justifying the necessity of additional education policies to complement the cash transfer program.
Technological skills are critical for high-productivity occupations. Between 2012 and 2017, a selected group of primary schools in Costa Rica were provided with one laptop per enrolled student. This paper evaluates this ambitious intervention by elucidating the effects on students’ educational and labor market aspirations, school outcomes, and time allocation after six years of access to a computer with connectivity. Using baseline, midline, and endline primary data from program participants and a control group, and a difference-in-difference strategy, this study shows that the program influenced treated students to increase their school motivation, their target education completion, and their intention to migrate in adulthood. The results do not find conclusive evidence of positive change toward pursuing computer science-related occupations or office-based jobs. The findings show evidence of a significant increase in computer usage for treated children but no impacts on the time spent performing homework, outdoor activities, and home chores.
Conditional cash transfers (CCT) have become a common solution aiming to reduce poverty by increasing the human capital of children. In 2006, the Government of Costa Rica introduced Avancemos, a nationwide CCT program, with the premise that a monetary subsidy, conditional on school attendance, would offset adolescents' opportunity cost from working and increase secondary school completion. In this paper, we assess whether the program achieved its main objective of increasing secondary schooling and reducing adolescent labor, and we disentangle the mechanisms generating these effects. We used data from the Costa Rica National Household Survey (2006–2014) collected by the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses. The program effects are estimated through a propensity score matching technique. We find that for program beneficiaries, Avancemos led to increases of about 27% in attendance and 0.72 year of schooling, and a decrease of 6% in the likelihood of labor participation. We also present evidence that economic vulnerability is not the only or main cause for school dropout and argue that efforts complementary to CCT, such as improving instruction quality and offering more information on the returns to education, are needed to increase attendance and completion and to reduce child labor outcomes.
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