Social welfare, sir, is not a charity act

MANILA, Philippines—Solita C. Monsod, University of the Philippines School of Economics professor emerita, endorses the Aquino administration’s Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) program, which goes by the brand-name Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program. I, a UP kickout, reject it.

Here are her reasons, and mine.

She says that CCT programs have “generally succeeded in many other countries—17 at last count”; and that “evaluation studies show they have significant beneficial impacts on schooling, health, infant mortality, child labor and poverty. And on inequality as well.”

I wish professors of economics would stop saying that. People might think it’s true just because it is professors of economics saying so.

In an article published in June 2004, economics professors Alain de Janvry and Elizabeth Sadoulet of the University of California at Berkely write, “[CCT] programs have been hailed as being the most significant innovations in promoting social development in recent years.” Then they cite these figures from the CCT program of Mexico, where it (i.e., CCT programs) all started in 1997: Increase in primary school enrolment, 1 percentage point. Which means “the cost of sending an additional child to school is, as a consequence, no less than $9,600/year.”

But the increase in secondary school enrolment is 12 percentage points—from 64 percent to 76 percent—which erases the educational gap between the poor and non-poor in program communities. “A remarkable achievement,” they say. Then they explain what those figures mean: “[Sixty-four percent] of the recipients of transfers would have gone to school without a transfer.” And “[Twenty-four percent] of the children that qualify for the program and received an offer of a CCT failed to participate.” Meaning, I suppose, that they received the transfer but did not comply with the conditions. Now, if that’s significant and beneficial, I don’t know what is trivial and sucks.

It gets worse.

In their 2009 Policy Research Report on CCTs, World Bank economists Ariel Fiszbein and Norbert Schady write, “CCTs have increased the likelihood that households will take their children for preventive health checkups,” and without batting a semicolon, “but that has not always led to better child nutritional status.” They also write that “school enrolment rates have increased substantially among program beneficiaries,” and, in the same breath, this: “[B]ut there is little evidence of improvements in learning outcomes.”

Indeed, these baffled statements are preceded by this sentence: “The evidence of improvements in final outcomes in health and education is more mixed.” Which is WorldBankspeak for “It’s beneficial but it sucks.”

And here’s the punch line: “[These findings] also suggest the need to experiment with conditions that focus on outcomes rather than on the uses of services alone.” Twelve years later—and so many billion dollars borrowed by so many countries with lots and lots of very, very poor people—the World Bank wants to do experiments!

The question now is: Did anyone at the Department of Social Welfare and Development, which is asking Congress to allocate P21.2 billion to its own CCT program, even bother to read this report? It’s a report, after all, by the main proponent of and source of loans for CCT programs, not by Freedom from Debt Coalition.

Did anyone at the National Economic Development Authority, for that matter, whose job it is to protect public funds from being spent so uneconomically? Did anyone at the Presidential Management Staff, whose job it is to protect President Aquino from committing his name and office to a program so easy to mismanage? Did anyone at the Department of Budget and Management, whose job it is to…

Oh, why bother with them anymore?

Our only hope was Congress, but they doused that hope before the sun came out last Saturday. They passed President Aquino’s 2011 budget without touching the P21.2 billion for Pantawid. Only they could have prevented the Aquino administration from using the people’s money to try and buy the love of the very poor. (Which it would not, of course; look how meager the love Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo bought with P15 billion in her own Pantawid.)

And a faint hope it was. The so-called militant representatives, who wanted to realign the proposed Pantawid budget to more sensible projects and sustainable programs, were up against the pork barrel juggernaut. They did occupy the moral high ground awhile, until they consented to Rep. Gloria Arroyo joining their ranks by letting her sign their manifesto. That moral high ground became a mound of mud. (That was the clincher for Mr. Aquino, perhaps; for Arroyo’s opposition to any program is a seal of approval to many.)

But, where moral grounds are concerned, the supporters of Mr. Aquino’s Pantawid are still in deeper pit. Because their moral position is, essentially, what Cagayan de Oro Rep. Rufus Rodriguez has said about the P21 billion being “very much needed by families who are struggling to stay afloat.”

That they need it, sir, is the worst reason for government to spend public funds on its poorest citizens—for that would be an act of charity. Governments are not in the charity business; their business is governance. Their fundamental purpose is to serve their citizens as a matter of right, and not as a matter of compassion. To fulfill that purpose governments that are good at governance see to it that their nations’ resources—the most important of which are the very people they are mandated to serve—are put to productive use. Where they fail, they provide social welfare.

And social welfare, sir, is not a charity. It is the right of every citizen to be protected by government from the maladies of a badly governed society. If the government in which you serve must do that by means of cash transfers—indeed because it has so badly governed our society that our social welfare institutions are in shambles, and social welfare services are nonexistent—then do that as your duty to them as citizens, and not out of the goodness of your heart because they are struggling to stay afloat.

And why am I saying this to the good congressman, and not to the social welfare secretary? Because I expect a more intelligent response from him than from her, whose only justification for her flagship project is…

Oh, why bother with her anymore? –Romeo D. Bohol, Philippine Daily Inquirer

(Romeo D. Bohol is a retired advertising copywriter.)