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In 1997, Mexico launched a new incentive-based poverty reduction program to enhance the human capital of those living in extreme poverty. This book presents a case study of Progresa-Oportunidades, focusing on the main factors that have contributed to the program's sustainability, policies that have allowed it to operate at the national level, and future challenges.

Led by the Office of Economic Opportunity, Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty reflected the president’s belief that, just as the civil rights movement and federal law tore down legalized segregation, progressive government and grassroots activism could eradicate poverty in the United States. Yet few have attempted to evaluate the relationship between the OEO and the freedom struggles of the 1960s. Focusing on the unique situation presented by Texas, Freedom Is Not Enough examines how the War on Poverty manifested itself in a state marked by racial division and diversity—and by endemic poverty. Though the War on Poverty did not eradicate destitution in the United States, the history of the effort provides a unique window to examine the politics of race and social justice in the 1960s. William S. Clayson traces the rise and fall of postwar liberalism in the Lone Star State against a backdrop of dissent among Chicano militants and black nationalists who rejected Johnson's brand of liberalism. The conservative backlash that followed is another result of the dramatic political shifts revealed in the history of the OEO, completing this study of a unique facet in Texas’s historical identity.

Environmental conditional cash transfers are popular but their impacts are not well understood. We evaluate land cover and wealth impacts of a federal program that pays landowners for protecting forest. Panel data for program beneficiaries and rejected applicants allow us to control for fixed differences and time trends affecting both groups. We find the program reduces the expected land cover loss by 40–51 percent and generates small but positive poverty alleviation. Environmental gains are higher where poverty is low while household gains are higher where deforestation risk is low, illustrating the difficulty of meeting multiple policy goals with one tool.

Today, over half of the world’s population lives in urban areas and it is projected that, by 2050, two out of three people will live in a city. This increased rural–urban migration, coupled with housing poverty, has led to the growth and formation of informal settlements, commonly known as slums. In Mexico, 25% of the urban population now live in informal settlements with varying degrees of deprivation. Although some informal neighbourhoods have contributed to the upward mobility of the inhabitants, the majority still lack basic services. Mexico City and the conurbation around it form a mega city of 21million people that has been growing in a manner qualified as ‘highly unproductive, (that) deepens inequality, raises pollution levels’ (available at: https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollective/making-way-urban-reform-mexico/176466/) and contains the largest slum in the world: Neza-Chalco-Izta. Urban reforms are now aiming to improve the conditions in these slums and therefore it is very important to have reliable tools to measure the changes that are underway. In this paper, we use exploratory factor analysis to define an index of shelter deprivation in Mexico City, namely the Slum Severity Index (SSI), based on the UN-HABITAT’s definition of slum. We apply this novel approach to the Census survey of Mexico and measure the shelter deprivation levels of households from 1990 to 2010. The analysis highlights high variability in housing conditions within Mexico City. We find that the SSI decreased significantly between 1990 and 2000 as a result of several policy reforms but increased between 2000 and 2010. We also show correlations of the SSI with other social factors such as education, health and fertility. We present a validation of the SSI using Grey Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) features extracted from Very-High Resolution (VHR) remote-sensed satellite images. Finally, we show that the SSI can present a cardinally meaningful assessment of the extent of deprivation compared with a similar index defined by Connolly (Connolly P (2009) Observing the evolution of irregular settlements: Mexico city’s colonias populares, 1990 to 2005. International Development Planning Review 31: 1–35) that studies shelter deprivation in Mexico. 如今，超过一半的世界人口生活在城市地区，预计到2050年，三分之二的人口将生活在城市。越来越多的乡村到城市移民加上住房贫困，导致了非正规住区的增长和形成，它们通常被称为贫民窟。在墨西哥，目前25%的城市人口生活在不同程度贫困的非正规住区。尽管一些非正规住区促进了居民的向上流动，但大多数居民仍然缺乏基本服务。墨西哥城及其周围的大都市区形成了一个拥有2,100万人口的巨型城市，其增长方式属于“加剧不平等和污染水平的高生产率”（可在以下网站查阅： https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollective/making-way-urban-reform-mexico/176466/），并包括世界上最大的贫民窟那扎-查可-伊泽塔(Neza-Chalco-Izta)。城市改革的目标是改善这些贫民窟的条件，因此拥有可靠的工具来衡量正在发生的变化非常重要。在本文中，我们根据联合国人居署对贫民窟的定义，使用探索性因素分析来定义墨西哥城的住房匮乏指数，即贫民窟严重程度指数(SSI)。我们将这一新方法应用于墨西哥的人口普查，并测量了1990年至2010年期间家庭住房匮乏的程度。我们的分析凸显了墨西哥城住房条件的高度可变性。我们发现，由于若干政策改革，SSI在1990年至2000年期间大幅下降，但在2000年至2010年期间有所上升。我们还揭示了SSI与教育、健康和生育率等其他社会因素的相关性。我们利用从超高分辨率(VHR)遥感卫星图像中提取的灰度共生矩阵(GLCM)特征对SSI进行了验证。最后，我们证明，与康纳利定义的类似指数（Connolly P (2009) Observing the evolution of irregular settlements: Mexico city’s colonias populares, 1990 to 2005.International Development Planning Review 31:1-35）相比，SSI可以对贫困程度进行具有最重大意义的评估。

This paper shows that poor households' entitlement to an exogenous, temporary, but guaranteed income stream increases Mexican migration to the United States, although this income is mainly consumed. Some households use the entitlement to this income stream as collateral to finance the migration. The new migrations come from previously constrained individuals and households and worsen migrant skills. In sum, financial constraints to international migration are binding for poor Mexicans, some of whom would like to migrate but cannot afford to. As growth and antipoverty and microfinance programs relax financial constraints for the poor, low-skilled Mexican migration to the United States will likely increase.

We study the consequences of poverty-alleviation programs for environmental degradation. We exploit the community-level eligibility discontinuity for a conditional cash transfer program in Mexico to identify the impacts of income increases on deforestation and use the program's initial randomized rollout to explore household responses. We find that additional income raises consumption of land-intensive goods and increases deforestation. The observed production response and deforestation increase are larger in communities with poor road infrastructure. This suggests that better access to markets disperses environmental harm and that the full effects of poverty alleviation on the environment can be observed only where poor infrastructure localizes them.

Focusing on different façades of financial well-being such as wealth accumulation and retirement planning, various determinants of financial well-being have been unearthed, and financial literacy has emerged as a crucial factor that increases financial well-being. Hence, financial literacy has been an important policy instrument to increase the financial wellbeing of individuals, particularly given that it is relatively easy to implement. This paper is an attempt to pave the way for such policies in a group of middle income countries, namely Mexico, Lebanon, Uruguay, Colombia and Turkey. After establishing financial literacy levels, we identify the least financially literate groups in each country to facilitate targeting of public policy. We find that women, younger adults and individuals who cannot read or write in the official language of their country of residence have lower financial literacy scores. In line with the previous findings in the literature on the developed countries, our results indicate that financial literacy increases with education. We also show that it is not only the years of education, but also the quality. In Mexico and Turkey, there are large regional differences that must be addressed. We also find that differences in financial literacy across countries persist even when differences in structural characteristics are taken into account. A partial explanation may be provided by differences in financial inclusion.

Many peri-urban areas in developing regions are associated with poverty. The poor peri-urban resident may have moved in and established in precarious conditions, or may have resided in the area before the urban encroachment and so have a rural background. Former poor rural residents living on the fringes of cities are considered to be very vulnerable since they are subjected to a livelihood transmutation while they try to escape from poverty. Drawing on longitudinal quantitative and qualitative data from three communities in the periphery of Mexico City, this paper traces the vicious and enabling processes by which peri-urban small farmers change their poverty status over time. The findings support the importance of multidisciplinary explanatory frameworks for understanding poverty dynamics in peri-urban areas. Micro-level process-based analysis may help to support more appropriate and inclusive social and poverty reduction policies in (peri-)urban areas in developing regions.

Using data from a randomized experiment, we find that poor rural Mexican households invested part of their cash transfers from the Oportunidades program in productive assets, increasing agricultural income by almost 10 percent after 18 months of benefits. We estimate that for each peso transferred, households consume 74 cents and invest the rest, permanently increasing long-term consumption by about 1.6 cents. Results suggest that cash transfers can achieve long-term increases in consumption through investment in productive activities, thereby permitting beneficiary households to attain higher living standards that are sustained even after transitioning off the program.