Quid Pro Quo

摘要

American policymakers rarely take their cues from Mexico: advice usually flows the other way. So it must have been gratifying for those running Opor-tunidades, a welfare programme serving 5m poor Mexican families, when the city of New York turned to them in 2006 for help with Opportunity NYC, a new social-welfare programme promoted by the city's mayor, Michael Bloomberg.rnOportunidades is one of the best-known examples of an increasingly popular kind of social assistance called conditional cash-transfer (CCT) programmes. Unlike traditional welfare schemes, which dole out money without demanding anything in return, CCTS will only pay out if the recipients ensure their children regularly attend school and health facilities or schools alone.rnThese programmes have swept across the developing world. In 1997 Mexico was one of only three countries to have a cct programme. By 2008, as the World Bank documents in a new report, virtually every country in Latin America had one. So did Indonesia, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, the Philippines, Bangladesh, India, Turkey, Cambodia, Pakistan and Kenya. Some of these programmes are huge: Brazil's Bolsa Familia serves 11m families.