among the population that comprised the first phase of incorporation to PROSPERA 20 years ago. Furthermore, we estimate the returns in labor income to improvements in health and education that are attributable to PROSPERA.

The analysis enables us to show that in the rural Mexican households in villages where PROSPERA began, there is a relatively high level of intergenerational mobility in health and education. This population presents important absolute mobility in health (height) and education (years of schooling), that is larger among youth with greater exposure to PROSPERA, for whom increases in height and years of schooling are greater than expected, after accounting for secular trends in the country. These increases in height and schooling reflect improvements accumulated during critical growth and development periods attributable to several factors that have been well documented in the short and mid-term evaluations, such as: improvements in nutrition, reduction in infant mortality, increases in the use of health services, and continued enrollment in school.

Our results indicate that the potential for intergenerational mobility is greater in education than in health, which may be due to genetic and epigenetic factors having greater relative importance as determinants of height (our indicator for human health capital) than as determinants of education. Despite this, the potential mobility of both human capital indicators is large, that is, there is a margin for improving health and education of this population that is not fully determined by inheritance. These improvements may only be achieved through targeted policies promoting the creation of better environmental and contextual conditions, and the creation of economic opportunities (jobs) for the population, specifically those living in poverty.

Beyond the effects on the indicators of health and education capital accumulation, we estimated that the intergenerational mobility in these dimensions is translated into labour market returns. The fact that both height and schooling promote intergenerational social mobility highlights PROSPERA’s potential to improve population outcomes, especially when individuals receive the transfers during critical periods of growth and development. Thus, we find that the population with greater early exposure to PROSPERA has higher human capital and higher labor income after 20 years.

It is important to note that these outcomes have occurred during a time of changing population health in Mexico, marked by a large increase in the prevalence of non-communicable diseases in the adult population. This change in population health is related to the overweight and obesity epidemic that continues to affect the entire population, and which began at approximately the same time as PROSPERA. This epidemic especially affects low-income populations. The analyses conducted in this paper show that, although the services promoted by the program are insufficient to revert the observed increase in the overweight and obesity indicators, PROSPERA has contributed to reducing such an increase. This is related to the increase in height: with a constant weight, greater height is reflected in lower BMI.

The analysis performed here has some important limitations, the most notable being the limited data available in ENCEL 2017. In this round of the survey, an important set of men and women from the households that received PROSPERA in its initial phases were interviewed. However, the survey does not include the individuals who have migrated outside of Mexico and those who have migrated elsewhere in the country. ENCEL 2017 includes only individuals who did not migrate, or those who migrated within the same seven states of the original panel, and only to certain large cities within those states. The results of the previous evaluations indicate that it is reasonable to expect that the average conditions of those who migrated outside Mexico are, in general, better than the conditions of those who remained. This means that the results presented here may reflect an underestimation of the effects of PROSPERA.

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