Mexico: inpoverishment and the conditional cash transfers programmes of the World Bank

Villarespe Reyes, Veronica and Sosa Ferreira, Ana Patricia (2008): Mexico: inpoverishment and the conditional cash transfers programmes of the World Bank.

Abstract

Abstract Poverty reproduces into the system, which generates it. The system creates conditions to prevail and to secure functionality. The erosion of the possibilities of intergenerational social mobility, associated with the reproduction or poverty, is not a big deal to the system as long as it allows the State legitimation. In Mexico, at the present time, policies aimed at alleviating poverty, in terms of such legitimation, play a very important role as a means to redistribute income. These policies are linked to other programmes which correspond to the so called structural reforms of neoclassical style, but have nothing to do with the real structural conditions which produce the economics slumps, inflation, concentration of income and other restrictive policies. Programmes like these are known as programmes of Conditional Cash Transfers (CCT). Our paper focuses on analysing the official results of poverty measurement and the evolution of the factors which affect the impoverishment process in order to demonstrate that the official programme to fight against poverty constitutes in fact an instrument to regulate it quantitatively, without improving the social conditions for the reproduction of the social forces. This paper intends to draw elements in order to consider the evolution of poverty itself and the impoverishment of people and their conditions of restrictive perspective growth, based on the official records of poverty. The CCT programmes based their policies on income-consumption, and these obey only to a particular conception of poverty. Consequently, these programmes try to raise the income, in order to raise consumption. Although it is important for people to receive money to purchase consume goods, and this is a short-term aid, in the long run, it does not eradicate poverty. In fact, the CCT programmes try to invest in people as a human capital in order to secure the reproduction of the labour force. In these terms, programmes aim at people being trained or having better salaries, but do not necessarily create a better life for them.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: poverty; neo-liberalism; conditional cash transfers programmes; human capital
• Subjects: I - Health, Education, and Welfare > I0 - General; I - Health, Education, and Welfare > I3 - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty > I38 - Government Policy ; Provision and Effects of Welfare Programs; I - Health, Education, and Welfare > I3 - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty > I32 - Measurement and Analysis of Poverty

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