摘要：The Bolsa Escola (‘school stipend’) and its successor the Bolsa Familia (‘family stipend’) schemes have formed a crucial and successful part of Brazil’s welfare program. Bolsa Escola provided aid to Brazil’s poorest families on the condition that their children attended school, and Bolsa Familia has extended this idea, giving aid on the condition that children both attend school and receive vaccinations. Bolsa Familia is currently the largest Conditional Cash Transfer Program (CCTP) in the world, costing roughly 0.5% of Brazilian GDP and helping around 11.2 million families (around 44 million Brazilians, constituting roughly one fifth of the population). Multilateral institutions have praised the schemes, and they are setting a leading example to other developing nations. In 2005, Paul Wolfowitz (former president of the World Bank) said, ‘Bolsa Familia has already become a highly praised model of effective social policy. Countries around the world are drawing lessons from Brazil’s experience and are trying to produce the same results for their own people’.
This paper will ask whether such attempts to implement schemes like Bolsa Escola in other countries are likely to have sustainable success. In order to answer this question, we the authors will take broadly two approaches:
Firstly, we will focus specifically on Bolsa Escola in Brazil. We will ask which have been the most successful, and which have been the most problematic, parts of Bolsa Escola (and Bolsa Familia; although emphasis will be placed upon Bolsa Escola, since we will predominantly focus upon the role of CCTPs in the educational sector). In light of this analysis, we shall consider whether a Bolsa Escola-style scheme could feasibly be implemented in other countries; and if so, which particular aspects of the Bolsa Escola scheme should be emulated and which should be adapted or avoided.
Secondly, we shall examine how other countries’ actual attempts to implement a Bolsa Escola-type scheme have fared. The other countries that we shall study in detail are Ecuador and Guatemala. These countries have already experimented with CCTPs, and so the case study of each country will address broadly three issues: firstly, how the CCTP in that country is similar to and how it is different from Bolsa Escola; secondly, what the successes and the weaknesses of that country’s CCTP have been; and thirdly, what that country’s experience might suggest about the broader feasibility of adopting Bolsa Escola-type schemes in other countries worldwide.
Overall, our aim is to examine the role of CCTPs from a somewhat different angle than has been the case in previous studies: we will emphasise the feasibility and sustainability of already existing and potential future programs. We shall suggest areas that might merit further study, and issues that policymakers need to address in the design and implementation of current and future CCTPs.
关键词：Condicional cash transfer program, schemes, welfare prgram, social policy, educational sector.
