Abstract
It is now a well-known sad story that Alan Garcia's APRA government initially raised high hopes within and outside Peru and then collapsed into incoherent policy-making and political chaos, with hyper-inflation and a drastic increase in insurgent violence as a result. The social costs of that collapse have been grave indeed, and the worst victims have been the nation's poor, who were already subsisting at deplorable levels prior to the crisis. Paradoxically, one of the priorities of the APRA government upon coming to power in 1985 was the improvement of the precarious situation of the nation's poor and marginalised population in the pueblos jóvenes–shanty-towns–and in the sierra. The APRA government introduced a variety of innovative strategies directed at these groups. The most highly publicised of those–the Programa de Apoyo de Ingreso Temporal (PAIT)–is the subject of this study.

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