Mateus Felipe Pereira Leite

Brazil’s Programa Bolsa Família (PBF) is the largest conditional cash transfer (CCT) in the world. It aims to reduce poverty by providing money to poor households, conditional on children attending school and regular medical appointments. What we call the common rationale holds that these conditionalities induce parents, especially mothers, to invest in their children’s human capital, helping to break the intergenerational cycle of poverty. While PBF’s short-term effects on income poverty and some school and health outcomes are well established, evidence for the common rationale remains limited and uncertain. Yet this does not exhaust the case for PBF’s conditionalities. This chapter argues that they can still be defended on other normative grounds. To make this case, we develop a framework for normative evaluation that incorporates attention to context, synthetic reasoning, and recognition of the normative weight of social beliefs. PBF and its conditionalities are then evaluated across three dimensions: programmatic performance, legitimacy, and feasibility. PBF as a whole performs well on all three. Conditionalities in particular enhance the program’s legitimacy among non-beneficiaries, increase the political and public support needed for its endurance, and contribute positively by strengthening beneficiaries’ connection to free public services and improving the coordination of Brazil’s welfare system. While this is a conditional and contextual defense of conditionalities, it provides general lessons for the debate on basic income. Conditional transfers can be superior to unconditional ones when they connect basic income with the offer of universal basic services. This is particularly important if we think basic income can undermine welfare state universalism.