The structure of poverty in rural Argentina is clear: (a) female-headed households are poorer than male-headed households, (b) young households/household heads are poorer than older households/household heads, (c) the poor tend to work more in the informal sector, (d) a greater share of those engaged in agriculture are poor, (e) larger households are poorer than smaller households, and (f) small landholders tend to be poorer than large landholders and the landless. Furthermore, the deepest poverty is among the poorly educated, and young household heads with children. Without interventions to improve their opportunities and assets, their plight is likely to worsen.

From the standpoint of policy development the following are the three most salient features of rural poverty in Argentina to emerge from this study: (1) poverty is concentrated in young families and is transitory, (2) poverty is concentrated where provision of services is most difficult, and (3) small landholdings are a poverty anchor.

Poverty is concentrated in younger households. Data reveal that all households headed by a person younger than age 25 are extremely poor and poverty drops off as the family ages in dispersed rural areas in Argentina. As presented in Table 5.2, probit regression analysis of the correlation of indigent poverty in dispersed areas shows that the probability of being indigent falls by 0.7 percent for each year older the household head is. The fact that poverty declines with increasing age of the household head is strongly related to the average number of children in the household (see Table 5.2 and Figure 5.1) **.** Table 5.2 shows that indigent poverty falls by 39 percent when the dependency ratio falls by one percent and Figure 5.1 shows that from age 45 the average number of children of the household head and the average number of children under age 15 decreases drastically with increasing age of the household head. As children leave the household they continue to contribute significantly to their parents’ households (see Verner 2006). For poor households 27 percent of household income comes in the form of transfers and remittances. These transfers are almost completely private. The survey found that government transfers basically did not reach the poor in dispersed rural areas. The pattern of large young families, the high rate of departure of the children from the household, and significant remittances is key in explaining the observed reduction in poverty with household age.

Young parents with low income, low level of education, and few assets may also suffer poor health because access to quality heath care is very limited in remote rural areas (2.6 million of the rural population lacks health insurance, more so in the Northeast and Northwest). Their children receive low quality education, and parents have no access to kindergartens for the youngest offspring. Such young parents face a high probability of being unemployed or active only in the household, and have no access to employment benefits or other social benefits, except in a few cases to Jefas. Data from RHS show that in dispersed rural areas only 3.9 percent of household heads receive Jefas (see also Section 6). There is considerable evidence from other settings that benefits associated with early childhood interventions are very high, especially for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, because this is a critical stage in child development and because returns to any productive investment in children accrue over a much longer period of time than 24