Children's health opportunities and project evaluation: Mexico's Oportunidades program

We propose a methodology to evaluate social projects from an (equality of) opportunity perspective by looking at their effect on (parts of) the distribution of outcomes conditional on morally irrelevant characteristics, taken here to be parental education level and indigenous background. The methodology is applied to evaluate the effects on children’s health outcomes of Mexico’s Oportunidades program, one of the world’s largest conditional cash transfer programs for poor households. The evidence shows that the gains in health opportunities for children from indigenous background are substantial and situated in crucial parts of the distribution, while the gains for children from non-indigenous backgrounds are more limited.