Poverty and Adolescent Risk in Mexico

在FIRCA申请中，我们建议延长父母补助金，以调查一项名为PROGRESA的独特扶贫计划对墨西哥儿童健康和发展的影响。拟议的扩展是调查经济发展和减贫对青少年风险行为的影响。具体而言，我们将评估PROGRESA对药物，酒精和烟草使用以及性行为的影响。由于PROGRESA增加了家庭收入，并为儿童留在学校提供了经济激励，我们实际上将检验这样一个假设，即改善极端贫困家庭青少年的教育和生活条件会减少危险行为。我们假设，教育和生活条件的改善将减少青少年酗酒、吸烟和吸毒，并减少导致意外怀孕和性传播疾病的性行为。我们的分析将利用随机对照设计。1998年，506个PROGRESA村庄被随机分配到对照组和治疗组。治疗村中符合条件的家庭立即得到补助，而对照村中符合条件的家庭的补助则推迟到2000年以后。在两年的试验期内，对大约15 000个家庭的80 000多人进行了干预前基线调查，并对这些家庭进行了五次后续调查（每隔六个月）。在父母补助金下，我们正在2003年对这些家庭进行一次后续调查。这项后续调查将在实验结束后三年进行，将包括健康状况和认知发展的措施。在这个项目中，我们建议通过在2003年由父母资助的调查中增加一个青少年风险行为模块来测试青少年风险假设。因此，这项建议与父母补助金有关，通过一项共同调查，并利用PROGRESA的干预措施，研究减轻贫困对个人健康和福利的影响。

In this FIRCA application, we propose to extend a parent grant that investigates the effect of a unique poverty alleviation program called PROGRESA on child health and development in Mexico. The proposed extension is to investigate the impact of economic development and poverty reduction on adolescent risk behavior. Specifically, we will evaluate the impact of PROGRESA on drug, alcohol and tobacco use, and on sexual practices. Since PROGRESA increases household income and provides financial incentives for children to stay in school, we will be in fact testing the hypothesis that improving the education and living conditions of adolescents in extremely poor households reduces risky behaviors. We hypothesize that improved education and living conditions will reduce adolescent alcohol, tobacco and drug use, and will reduce sexual practices leading to unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. Our analysis will take advantage of a randomized controlled design. In 1998, 506 PROGRESA villages were randomly assigned to control and treatment groups. Eligible households in treatment villages received benefits immediately, while benefits for eligible households in control villages were postponed until after the year 2000. A pre-intervention baseline survey of approximately 15,000 households with over 80,000 individuals and five follow-up surveys (at six month intervals) of the same households were conducted over the two-year experimental period. Under the parent grant, we are conducting a follow-up survey of the same households in 2003. This follow-up survey will be three years after the experiment ended and it will include measures of health status and measures of cognitive development. In this project, we propose to test the adolescent risk hypotheses by adding an adolescent risk behavior module to the 2003 survey funded by the parent grant. Therefore, this proposal is related to the parent grant through a common survey and taking advantage of the PROGRESA intervention to study the impact of poverty alleviation on individual health and welfare.