Differences in the quality of life due to the effects of social policies: the case of Crédito de Desarrollo Humano in Ecuador

Abstract

The objective of this research project is to determine the incidence of the “Crédito de Desarrollo Humano” on the quality of life of the beneficiaries through the differences in access to basic services, education, type of housing, and earnings in terms of income, purchasing power and economic situation. It is intended to contribute in the discussion between the bonus and the credit as social protection policies of which there is no generalized record of their effects on the beneficiaries according to the academic literature reviewed. The study population were the beneficiaries settled in the urban area of Loja city. The research was descriptive and deductive with a quantitative approach in which the use of the U test of Mann-Whitney and the t distribution w the statistic used to find statistically significant results that verify that the perceptions confirm the hypothesis: access to credit improves the quality of life of the beneficiaries compared to those with the economic bonus. In addition, the calculation of the probability of superiority PS made it possible to find the size of the effect of access to credit on the beneficiaries and to find out which of the groups is superior in terms of their perceptions. The results show that the beneficiaries of the credit are in a more precarious situation than the beneficiaries of the economic bonus and that the effect of access to credit on the perceptions of the beneficiaries is minimum.