Publication: 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
Loading...
Published
2017-10
ISSN
Date
2017-10-30
Editor(s)
Abstract
In 2013, Mexico's Social Pension Program for the Elderly was expanded by changing its eligibility threshold from age 70 to age 65. Using pooled cross-sectional data from Mexico's National Household Income and Expenditure Survey, the exogenous variation around eligibility age was exploited to uncover the causal effects of this expansion on extreme poverty and labor supply of the newly eligible population, and to explore potential transmission mechanisms. Applying quasi-experimental methods, results show that the expansion of Mexico's Social Pension Program for the Elderly not only reduced the probability of the elderly being extreme poor, but it also reduced the extreme poverty gap, and the extreme poverty severity indexes of the elderly population. These effects on extreme poverty are generalizable to all individuals of the treated household. The results suggest that the expansion of the Social Pension Program for the Elderly did not have short-term effects on the labor force participation of the elderly. Accordingly, the analysis does not find that the program reduced labor income. In contrast with other impact evaluations of similar programs, the analysis does not find that the expansion of Mexico's program had a crowding out effect on domestic or international private transfers to the elderly.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Avila-Parra, Clemente; Escamilla-Guerrero, David. 2017. 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. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 8229. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/28614 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Digital Object Identifier
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Publication Climate and Social Sustainability in Fragility, Conflict, and Violence Contexts(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2026-01-07)Climate change is widely recognized as a driver of violent conflict, but its broader social effects remain less understood. Ignoring these dimensions risks a vicious cycle where climate policies might undermine socially just adaptation. Evidence is still limited on how climate shocks influence political participation, trust, or migration. This paper helps fill that gap by examining links between climate change, conflict, and social sustainability, with a focus on inclusion, resilience, cohesion, and legitimacy. Using secondary data from 2019–24, the study applies simple correlation-based methods to test three hypotheses on the nature, severity, and composition of these associations. The analysis combines multiple climate impact measures, new conflict classifications, recent social sustainability frameworks, and controls for population and geography. The results reveal strong correlations—not causation—between climate events and contexts of fragility, conflict, and violence. Climate impacts are most pronounced in both national and subnational conflict settings. The study also finds robust links between fragility, conflict, and violence and low levels of social sustainability, reflecting its role as both a driver and consequence of conflict. Some dimensions—such as violent events and insecurity—appear weaker in areas most affected by climate shocks. Two of the hypotheses are supported, and one remains inconclusive.Publication The Macroeconomic Implications of Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Options(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29)Estimating the macroeconomic implications of climate change impacts and adaptation options is a topic of intense research. This paper presents a framework in the World Bank's macrostructural model to assess climate-related damages. This approach has been used in many Country Climate and Development Reports, a World Bank diagnostic that identifies priorities to ensure continued development in spite of climate change and climate policy objectives. The methodology captures a set of impact channels through which climate change affects the economy by (1) connecting a set of biophysical models to the macroeconomic model and (2) exploring a set of development and climate scenarios. The paper summarizes the results for five countries, highlighting the sources and magnitudes of their vulnerability --- with estimated gross domestic product losses in 2050 exceeding 10 percent of gross domestic product in some countries and scenarios, although only a small set of impact channels is included. The paper also presents estimates of the macroeconomic gains from sector-level adaptation interventions, considering their upfront costs and avoided climate impacts and finding significant net gross domestic product gains from adaptation opportunities identified in the Country Climate and Development Reports. Finally, the paper discusses the limits of current modeling approaches, and their complementarity with empirical approaches based on historical data series. The integrated modeling approach proposed in this paper can inform policymakers as they make proactive decisions on climate change adaptation and resilience.Publication Institutional Capacity for Policy Implementation: An Analytical Framework(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2026-01-07)State capacity is an important prerequisite for policy implementation, yet at the country level it is difficult to measure, assess, and reform. This paper proposes a focus on institutional capacity: the ability of public institutions to implement the specific policy mandates for which they are responsible. Based on a review of existing literature, the paper defines the different dimensions that compose institutional capacity and groups them into two cross-cutting categories: organizational dimensions (personnel, financial resources, information systems, and management practices) and governance dimensions (transparency, independence, and accountability). The paper proposes measures for organizational and governance dimensions using existing data, shows intra-institutional variation of these measures within countries, and discusses how new data could be collected for better measurement of these concepts. Finally, the paper illustrates how the framework can be used to diagnose the sources of common problems related to weak policy implementation.Publication South Africa’s Fragmented Cities: The Unequal Burden of Labor Market Frictions(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2026-01-08)Using high-resolution administrative, census, and satellite data, this paper shows that South African cities are characterized by spatial mismatches between where people live and where jobs are located, relative to 20 global peers. Areas within 5 kilometers of commercial centers have 9,300 fewer residents per square kilometer than expected, which is 60 percent below the global median. Poor, dense neighborhoods are most affected. In Johannesburg, a 10-percentile increase in distance from the nearest business hub corresponds to a 3.7-percentile drop in asset wealth (a proxy of household wellbeing) and 4.9-percentile drop in employment. In Cape Town, the declines are 4.0 and 3.7 percentiles, respectively. Employment is 87 percent lower in the poorest decile than the richest in Johannesburg and 61 percent lower in Cape Town. These findings suggest that South Africa’s spatial organization of people and economic activity constrains agglomeration and reinforces inequality. This methodology provides a scalable and standardized data-driven framework to analyze spatial accessibility and agglomeration frictions in complex, data-constrained urban systems.Publication Investment in Emerging and Developing Economies(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2026-01-07)The world faces a pressing challenge to meet key development objectives amid slowing growth and rising macroeconomic and geopolitical risks. With the number of job seekers rising rapidly, infrastructure shortfalls continuing to be large, and climate costs mounting, the case for a significant investment push has never been stronger. Yet the capacity to respond in many emerging markets and developing economies has eroded. Since the global financial crisis, investment growth has slowed to about half its pace in the 2000s, with both public and private investment weakening. Foreign direct investment inflows—a critical source of capital, technology, and managerial know-how—have also fallen sharply and become increasingly concentrated, leaving low-income countries with only a marginal share. The risks of further retrenchment are significant, as trade tensions, policy uncertainty, and elevated debt levels continue to weigh on investment. Reigniting momentum will require ambitious domestic reforms to strengthen institutions, rebuild macro-fiscal stability, and deepen trade and investment integration—the foundations of a supportive business climate. At the same time, international cooperation is indispensable. A renewed commitment to a predictable system of cross-border trade and investment flows, combined with scaled-up financial support and sustained technical assistance, is essential to help emerging markets and developing economies—especially low-income countries and economies in fragile and conflict situations—bridge financing gaps and implement the domestic reforms needed to restore investment as an engine of growth, jobs, and development.
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Social Transfers, Labor Supply and Poverty Reduction : The Case of Albania(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2008-11)In 1993, in response to persistent unemployment, and rising poverty and social unrest, the government of Albania introduced an anti-poverty program, namely Ndihma Ekonomike; in 1995 it was extended to all poor households. This paper estimates the separate effects of participation in this income support program and the old-age pension program on objective and subjective measures of household poverty. The analysis uses the nationally representative Albanian Living Standards Measurement Surveys carried out in 2002 and 2005. Using propensity score matching methods, the paper finds that Ndihma Ekonomike households, particularly urban residents, have lower per capita consumption and are more likely to be discontented with their lives, financial situation, and consumption levels than their matched comparators. In contrast, households receiving pensions are not significantly different from their matched comparators in reference to the same set of outcomes. The paper finds that the negative impact of Ndihma Ekonomike participation on welfare is driven by a negative labor supply response among work-eligible individuals. This negative labor response is larger among women and urban residents. In contrast to Ndihma Ekonomike, the receipt of old-age pension income transfers does not significantly impact the labor supply of prime-age individuals living in pension householdsPublication Ex-Ante Methods to Assess the Impact of Social Insurance Policies on Labor Supply with an Application to Brazil(2009-08-01)This paper solves and estimates a stochastic model of optimal inter-temporal behavior to assess how changes in the design of the unemployment benefits and pension systems in Brazil could affect savings rates, the share of time that individuals spend outside of the formal sector, and retirement decisions. Dynamics depend on five main parameters: preferences regarding consumption and leisure, preferences regarding formal Vs. informal work, attitudes towards risks, the rate of time preference, and the distribution of an exogenous shock that affects movements in and out of the social security system (given individual decisions). The yearly household survey is used to create a pseudo panel by age-cohorts and estimate the joint distribution of model parameters based on a generalized version of the Gibbs sampler. The model does a good job in replicating the distribution of the members of a given cohort across states (in or out of the social security / active or retired). Because the parameters are related to individual preferences or exogenous shocks, the joint distribution is unlikely to change when the social insurance system changes. Thus, the model is used to explore how alternative policy interventions could affect behaviors and through this channel benefit levels and fiscal costs. The results from various simulations provide three main insights: (i) the Brazilian SI system today might generate distortions (lower savings rates and less formal employment) that increase the costs of the system and might generate regressive redistribution; (ii) there are important interactions between the unemployment benefits and pension systems, which calls for joint policy analysis when considering reforms; and (iii) current distortions could be reduced by creating an actuarial link between contributions and benefits and then combining matching contributions and anti-poverty targeted transfers to cover individuals with limited or no savings capacity.Publication Jobs for Brazil’s Poor : Social Protection Programs and Labor Supply Impacts on the Poor in Brazil(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-03)The World Bank is carrying out a program of Analytic and Advisory Activities (the Labor AAA) focused on the interface between social protection programs and labor supply and productivity. This focus relates to the debates in Brazil surrounding the issue of helping transfer beneficiaries graduate from poverty and from dependence on transfer incomes. The AAA is structured along two pillars. Pillar I addresses questions related to the impacts of explicit and implicit public transfers on labor supply and savings decisions. In particular, what is the effect of public transfers such as Bolsa Familia and those related to the social insurance system (pensions and unemployment) on work incentives, early entry and retirement, sector choice, and ultimately, public expenditures, human capital accumulation and growth. Pillar II focuses on program design and evaluation. The and goal is to identify how the portfolio of transfer and active labor market programs can be optimized to enhance the employability of the poor, help promote their graduation from poverty, and, ultimately, from dependence on transfer income. In addition, the Labor AAA includes a component to assess public perceptions about Social Protection programs. The Labor AAA is a living program that seeks to respond to questions posed by Brazilian policy-makers as they strengthen the education-social protection-labor market nexus. This approach is helping convene the different stakeholders at the federal level by bringing evidence and policy analysis to the debates.Publication Federative Republic of Brazil - Social Insurance and Labor Supply : Assessing Incentives and Redistribution(Washington, DC, 2009-12-30)This technical report analyzes the potential effects of the pensions and income protection systems on labor supply decisions and through this channel the coverage and cost of the programs. The report addresses five policy questions: (i) how is the pension system influencing decisions regarding entry into the labor market, sector choice (formal/informal), and retirement? (ii) How are current income protection programs affecting turnover; job search efforts and sector choice?; (iii) Are there interactions between the two systems that aggravate or mitigate incentive effects?; (iv) What is the role of redistributive policies in determining observed outcomes?; and (v) Are there policy interventions that could be considered to correct incentives, while securing adequate income protection for different population groups (including workers in the informal sector)? The report is organized in three sections. This first section discusses the motivations for the study and sets the context by briefly describing some key stylized facts about the Brazilian labor market. The focus is on the composition of the labor force, its distribution by occupational categories, unemployment risks, and transitions between employment states including workers flows between the formal and informal sectors. The second section analyzes the Brazilian social insurance system in terms of incentives and redistribution. It starts with an overview of institutional arrangements, programs, and financing mechanisms, which flags the problem of a high tax-wedge. The report then analyzes the rules of the pensions and income protection systems and their potential effects on behaviors. The final section proposes a policy framework to guide reforms that could 'correct' incentives by making redistribution more transparent and progressive. A behavioral life-cycle model estimated for Brazil is used to illustrate how the application of this framework could affect contribution densities (and therefore the time spent working in formal sector jobs), retirement ages, savings, and programs cost. A companion policy note on social insurance and labor supply summarizes the main conclusions and recommendations from the analysis.Publication An Ex-Ante Evaluation of the Impact of Social Insurance Policies on Labor Supply in Brazil : The Case for Explicit Over Implicit Redistribution(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-07)This paper solves and estimates a stochastic model of optimal inter-temporal behavior to assess how changes in the design of the income protection and pension systems in Brazil could affect savings rates, the share of time that individuals spend outside of the formal sector, and retirement decisions. Dynamics depend on five main parameters: preferences regarding consumption and leisure, preferences regarding formal Vs. informal work, attitudes towards risks, the rate of time preference, and the distributions of two exogenous shocks that affect movements in and out of the social security system (independently of individual decisions). The yearly household survey is used to create a pseudo panel by age-cohorts and estimate the joint distribution of model parameters based on a generalized version of the Gibbs sampler. The model does a good job in replicating the distribution of the members of the cohort across states (in or out of them social security / active or retired). Because the parameters are related to individual preferences or exogenous shocks, the joint distribution is unlikely to change when the social insurance system changes. Thus, the model is used to explore how alternative policy interventions could affect behaviors and through this channel benefit levels and fiscal costs. The results from various simulations provide three main insights: (i) the Brazilian SI system today might generate unnecessary distortions (lower savings rates, less formal employment, and more early retirement) that increase the costs of the system and might generate regressive redistribution; (ii) there are important interactions between the income protection and pension systems, which calls for joint policy analysis when considering reforms; and (iii) current distortions could be reduced by creating an actuarial link between contributions and benefits and then giving matching contributions or matching capital to individuals with limited savings capacity, which requires having individual savings accounts that can be funded or notional.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Public Policy and Extended Families : Evidence from Pensions in South Africa(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2003-01)How are resources allocated within extended families in developing economies? This question is investigated using a unique social experiment: the South African pension program. Under that program the elderly receive a cash transfer equal to roughly twice the per capita income of Africans in South Africa. The study examines how this transfer affects the labor supply of prime-age individuals living with these elderly in extended families. It finds a sharp drop in the working hours of prime-age individuals in these households when women turn 60 years old or men turn 65, the ages at which they become eligible for pensions. It also finds that the drop in labor supply is much larger when the pensioner is a woman, suggesting an imperfect pooling of resources. The allocation of resources among prime-age individuals depends strongly on their absolute age and gender as well as on their relative age. The oldest son in the household reduces his working hours more than any other prime-age household member.Publication Taxes, Spending, and Equity: International Patterns and Lessons for Developing Countries(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-11-17)Taxes and public spending underpin the basic administration of government and finance the human capital and infrastructure investments needed for economic growth. They can also have a significant and immediate impact on poverty and inequality. The question of how public finance can support longer-term growth objectives while promoting equity has become even more important in recent years, given the high fiscal deficits and debt levels most countries emerged with in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. These included the increasing cost of debt and the need to restart environmentally sustainable growth while helping households address the learning losses and other social scars caused by the pandemic. This paper examines the global evidence on which households pay which taxes and who benefits from what spending, and critically, the net effect on different households across the income distribution. The aim is to identify the patterns and lessons that emerge for designing progressive fiscal policies. A global dataset of 96 countries is assembled, spanning all regions of the world and all national income levels, grounded in the Commitment to Equity (CEQ) approach to fiscal incidence.Publication Presumptive Tax on Small and Microenterprises with a Gender Lens in Ethiopia(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-02-20)Governments often use simplified business tax systems, such as presumptive tax regimes, to register and tax small and microenterprises. Despite concerns about how such regimes could disproportionately affect female-owned and low-revenue entrepreneurs, there is a lack of empirical analysis examining the tax burden. The presumptive tax in Ethiopia has a complex assessment system, where the tax liabilities are determined according to the activity type and turnover (99 activities and 19 turnover bands), and some activities do not have a tax-free threshold. This paper uses two rounds of data in the Ethiopian Socioeconomic Surveys and the tax code to analyze the equity and gender implications of the presumptive tax on small and microenterprises by imputing the effective tax rates. There are three key findings. First, the effective tax rates are higher for businesses in the lowest quartile at 4.3 percent of turnover compared to 1.5 percent for businesses in the highest quartile, using the most recent survey, resulting in a regressive system. Second, male-owned businesses tend to operate in sectors without a tax-free threshold and are more likely than female-owned businesses to face higher tax rates. Third, the effective tax rates are high for businesses in food and beverage services, which is female-dominated, and for transit services, which is male-dominated, due to the lack of a tax-free threshold for these sectors. The study finds that an alternative presumptive tax system with a single tax rate on turnover and an exemption for all low-revenue businesses would be simpler for tax assessment and more progressive.Publication The Exposure of Workers to Artificial Intelligence in Low- and Middle-Income Countries(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-02-05)Research on the labor market implications of artificial intelligence has focused principally on high-income countries. This paper analyzes this issue using microdata from a large set of low- and middle-income countries, applying a measure of potential artificial intelligence occupational exposure to a harmonized set of labor force surveys for 25 countries, covering a population of 3.5 billion people. The approach advances work by using harmonized microdata at the level of individual workers, which allows for a multivariate analysis of factors associated with exposure. Additionally, unlike earlier papers, the paper uses highly detailed (4 digit) occupation codes, which provide a more reliable mapping of artificial intelligence exposure to occupation. Results within countries, show that artificial intelligence exposure is higher for women, urban workers, and those with higher education. Exposure decreases by country income level, with high exposure for just 12 percent of workers in low-income countries and 15 percent of workers in lower-middle-income countries. Furthermore, lack of access to electricity limits effective exposure in low-income countries. These results suggest that for developing countries, and in particular low-income countries, the labor market impacts of artificial intelligence will be more limited than in high-income countries. While greater exposure to artificial intelligence indicates larger potential for future changes in certain occupations, it does not equate to job loss, as it could result in augmentation of worker productivity, automation of some tasks, or both.Publication Digital Africa(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-03-13)All African countries need better and more jobs for their growing populations. "Digital Africa: Technological Transformation for Jobs" shows that broader use of productivity-enhancing, digital technologies by enterprises and households is imperative to generate such jobs, including for lower-skilled people. At the same time, it can support not only countries’ short-term objective of postpandemic economic recovery but also their vision of economic transformation with more inclusive growth. These outcomes are not automatic, however. Mobile internet availability has increased throughout the continent in recent years, but Africa’s uptake gap is the highest in the world. Areas with at least 3G mobile internet service now cover 84 percent of Africa’s population, but only 22 percent uses such services. And the average African business lags in the use of smartphones and computers as well as more sophisticated digital technologies that catalyze further productivity gains. Two issues explain the usage gap: affordability of these new technologies and willingness to use them. For the 40 percent of Africans below the extreme poverty line, mobile data plans alone would cost one-third of their incomes—in addition to the price of access devices, apps, and electricity. Data plans for small- and medium-size businesses are also more expensive than in other regions. Moreover, shortcomings in the quality of internet services—and in the supply of attractive, skills-appropriate apps that promote entrepreneurship and raise earnings—dampen people’s willingness to use them. For those countries already using these technologies, the development payoffs are significant. New empirical studies for this report add to the rapidly growing evidence that mobile internet availability directly raises enterprise productivity, increases jobs, and reduces poverty throughout Africa. To realize these and other benefits more widely, Africa’s countries must implement complementary and mutually reinforcing policies to strengthen both consumers’ ability to pay and willingness to use digital technologies. These interventions must prioritize productive use to generate large numbers of inclusive jobs in a region poised to benefit from a massive, youthful workforce—one projected to become the world’s largest by the end of this century.