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Link to originalsocial programs — including old-age pensions, stay-in-school scholarships, farm supports, and a rural tree-planting program — represent only one factor and not necessarily the most important. Also fueling the drop in poverty are wage increases, fueled by annual 20 percent hikes in the minimum wage that have had spillover effects in certain union contracts, together with a tightening of the nation’s outsourcing laws (liberalized in 2012) that has nudged some three million workers into formal employment and increased the number of people eligible for mandatory profit sharing. The lesson is clear: in the absence of upward pressure on wages and more favorable labor legislation, transfer programs on their own are not enough.