What Are the Effects of Expanding a Social Pension Program on Extreme Poverty and Labor Supply? : Evidence from Mexico's Pension Program for the Elderly

Avila-Parra, Clemente ; Escamilla-Guerrero, David

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: PENSION FUNDS;    PENSIONS;    LABOR SUPPLY;    ELDERLY;    SOCIAL ASSISTANCE;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-8229
RP-ID  :  WPS8229

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

In 2013, Mexico's Social PensionProgram for the Elderly was expanded by changing itseligibility threshold from age 70 to age 65. Using pooledcross-sectional data from Mexico's National HouseholdIncome and Expenditure Survey, the exogenous variationaround eligibility age was exploited to uncover the causaleffects of this expansion on extreme poverty and laborsupply of the newly eligible population, and to explorepotential transmission mechanisms. Applyingquasi-experimental methods, results show that the expansionof Mexico's Social Pension Program for the Elderly notonly reduced the probability of the elderly being extremepoor, but it also reduced the extreme poverty gap, and theextreme poverty severity indexes of the elderly population.These effects on extreme poverty are generalizable to allindividuals of the treated household. The results suggestthat the expansion of the Social Pension Program for theElderly did not have short-term effects on the labor forceparticipation of the elderly. Accordingly, the analysis doesnot find that the program reduced labor income. In contrastwith other impact evaluations of similar programs, theanalysis does not find that the expansion of Mexico'sprogram had a crowding out effect on domestic orinternational private transfers to the elderly.