Abstract:

Education allows achieving higher well-being and improves Quality of Life (QoL), but economic distress often leads to school dropout. Since 2007, the Mexico City government established the Guaranteed Education Program (EDUGAR) in order prevent dropout of those students whom lost financial support due to parental death or total and permanent impairment. In this paper, through a stratified sample of beneficiaries (1,147 children and 806 adults), we focus on their QoL perception. According to our results, most of children’s QoL dimensions – except for Psychological well-being and partially for Friends and social support –, improve after being entitled of EDUGAR benefits by returning to the pre-event levels or even improving. The Program allows recovering QoL dimensions for parents/tutors too but Couple relationship, as the event probably undermined intimate ties with the partner. As well, data analysis provide evidence that EDUGAR has a positive outcome for household environment in order to foster school attendance. Despite the transfer did not increase since EDUGAR inception, beneficiaries might even not be aware of the diminishing purchasing power of the support through time as the effect on children’s perception and parents/tutors’ satisfaction could be also the result of a mean reverting process anticipated by the hedonic adaptation framework analysis, rather than the expected consequence of the transference.

Keywords:

Mexico, Quality of Life, school dropout, unconditional transfers.