Cash Aid Research Articles

Economic impact of refugees

In 2015, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees accommodated over 15 million refugees, mostly in refugee camps in developing countries. The World Food Program provided these refugees with food aid, in cash or in kind. Refugees' impacts on host countries are controversial and little understood. This unique study analyzes the economic impacts of refugees on host-country economies within a 10-km radius of three Congolese refugee camps in Rwanda. Simulations using Monte Carlo methods reveal that cash aid to refugees creates significant positive income spillovers to host-country businesses and households. An additional adult refugee receiving cash aid increases annual real income in the local economy by $205 to $253, significantly more than the $120-$126 in aid each refugee receives. Trade between the local economy and the rest of Rwanda increases by $49 to $55. The impacts are lower for in-kind food aid, a finding relevant to development aid generally.

Eva Bertram.The Workfare State: Public Assistance Politics from the New Deal to the New Democrats.

Political scientist Eva Bertram has written an important study of the transition from what she terms the “welfarist” approach to social policy emblematized by policies of the New Deal, to a “workfarist” approach that gained momentum beginning in the late 1960s. The centerpiece of the book is the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996; the statute was passed by both houses of Congress under Republican control and signed by President Bill Clinton. The PRWORA eliminated the public aid program for parents and children, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which had begun as part of the New Deal in 1935, and replaced it with a program of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families that limited adult eligibility to a maximum of five years. With implementation of the PRWORA, cash aid for impoverished families ceased to be an entitlement available to all who met the eligibility criteria, and became a program whose administrators could turn applicants away when program costs reached a certain finite level. The statute made seeking and holding paid work mandatory for all of the adults who received aid under the program.

Natural disasters, mitigation investment and financial aid

AbstractWe consider firms facing the risk of natural disasters and study their problem of investing in mitigation if financial insurance is not available. The firms' problem is to choose the optimal timing and size of the investment. The timing problem leads to a critical productivity size where firms above it invest in mitigation while firms below the threshold decide to not invest. We investigate how cash aid such as emergency response, and in-kind aid such as reconstruction, rehabilitation or disaster risk reduction investments, affect the critical productivity threshold and the optimal investment size and characterize the international donor's optimal charity strategy.

The Impact of Diverting a Fuel Subsidy to the Agricultural Sector on Income Distribution and Poverty

Fuel subsidy is one of the various programs and measures undertaken by the government to alleviate poverty and at the same time to promote growth. As a result of a continuous increase in crude oil price at international levels, the burden of fuel subsidy on the government has become bigger. Thus, the government tries to reduce fuel subsidy gradually. The immediate impact of a reduction in fuel subsidy is an increase in the price of fuel at the retail/eve/. Then, there is a chain effect of an increase in price of fuel to the price of other goods and services. The end result is a decrease in purchasing power of the general consumer. To overcome this problem, the government introduces a direct transfer of payment to poor households, but this compensation is too small to counter the increase in the general price level. At the same time, it is found that this program has a negative impact on macro-economic performance and an increase in poverty, income disparity, and the depth of poverty. As an alternative to the direct cash aid to poor households, the government may transfer fuel subsidy to the agricultural sector. The purpose of this study is to analyze the impact of the diversion of fuel subsidy to the non-food crops in the agricultural sector on income and the poverty in Indonesia. This study employs a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model. The Foster-Greer-Thorbecke (FGT} index is used to measure various poverty indicators, such as head count, poverty gap and poverty severity indices. The households are classified into four categories; urban non-poor, urban poor, rural non-poor, and rural poor. Our simulation results show that diverting fuel subsidy by a certain percentage to non-food crops is able to increase households' income, thus reducing poverty.

The Supplemental Security Income Program and Welfare Reform

Over the past 20 years, the Supplemental Security Income Program (SSI), which provides federally funded income support for disabled individuals, has become one of the most important means‐tested cash aid programs in the United States. However, little research has examined the determinants of growth in SSI caseloads across states and over time. In this paper I use state panel data, exploiting variation both across states and over time, to determine what factors determine SSI disabled caseloads. I examine the relative importance of a number of factors, including economic conditions, health conditions, relative program generosity, and state fiscal situations. I then examine the effect of welfare reform as well as the effect of variation across states in welfare policies. Given previous research that provides evidence of interactions between the SSI program and other welfare programs that provide income support to single‐mother families, I also examine how the effects of the factors listed above have changed since the passage of major welfare reform in 1996. Results suggest that both economic conditions and welfare reform have significant effects on SSI participation and that the SSI program has become more responsive to business cycles since welfare reform.

The Impact of Diverting Fuel Subsidy to Agricultural Sector on Income Distribution and Poverty

The government has been implemented various policies and programs to promote growth and at the same time to alleviate poverty. However, there is a problem of budget deficit as a result of a big expenditure on subsidy, especially the subsidy on fuel. Thus, the government tries to staggeredly reduce fuel subsidy and at the same time compensate poor households in the form of direct cash aid. It is found that this policy has a negative impact on macro-economic performance and an increase in poverty level, income disparity, and the depth of poverty. As an alternative to disbursement of direct cash aid to the poor in lieu to a reduction in fuel subsidy, our study tries to analyze if the government diverts fuel subsidy to the agricultural sector. Thus, the objective of this study is to analyze the impact of diverting fuel subsidy to food crops agricultural sector on income distribution and poverty using the Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) analysis. To evaluate the disparity in income distribution, this study employs the beta distribution function developed by Decaluwe, et al. (1999). To analyze poverty incidence for each household group, we follow the Foster, Greer and Thorbecke (FGT) method. Households are grouped into four categories, urban non-poor, urban poor, rural non-poor, and rural poor households. This study conducts three simulations based the percentage of reduction in fuel subsidy.Our simulation results reveal that diverting of fuel subsidy by 43.2 percent to food crops sub-sector resulting in an increase in income of the urban non-poor, rural poor and rural non-poor. Also, these simulation shows that diverting of subsidy is able to reduce head count index of the poor households in rural area.

Informing, Enrolling, and Reenrolling CalWORKs Leavers in Food Stamps and Medi-Cal

Describes and analyzes the process of continuing enrollment in the Food Stamp and Medi-Cal programs after leaving cash aid.

The effects of failing to include hard-to-reach respondents in longitudinal surveys.

We sought to determine whether failure to locate hard-to-reach respondents in longitudinal studies causes biased and inaccurate study results. We performed a nonresponse simulation in a survey of 498 low-income women who received cash aid in a California county. Our simulation was based on a previously published analysis that found that women without children who applied for General Assistance experienced more violence than did women with children who applied for Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. We compared hard-to-reach respondents whom we reinterviewed only after extended follow-up effort 12 months after baseline with other respondents. We then removed these hard-to-reach respondents from our analysis. Other than having a greater prevalence of substance dependence (14% vs 6%), there were no significant differences between hard- and easy-to-reach respondents. However, excluding the hard to reach would have decreased response rates from 89% to 71% and nullified the findings, a result that did not stem primarily from reduced statistical power. The effects of failure to retain hard-to-reach respondents are not predicable based on respondent characteristics. Retention of these respondents should be a priority in public health research.

Cash and In-Kind Food Aid Transfers: The Case of Tsunami Emergency Aid in Banda Aceh

In order to be effective, international assistance to alleviate the impact of emergencies in poor countries must meet various criteria, including adequacy and rapidness of response. Assistance can take several different forms, including cash and in-kind assistance, which has given rise to vigorous debate in both theoretical and empirical literature. A significant policy question revolves around the relative merits of cash versus in-kind assistance. Using as an illuminating “case study” the emergency assistance programs employed in Aceh, Indonesia as part of the relief program to help combat the devastating the 2004 tsunami, this paper considers the arguments surrounding the comparative advantages of cash and in-kind assistance. It is argued that while existing empirical evidence is insufficient to draw categorical conclusions on the comparative merits of cash and in-kind disaster assistance methods in developing countries, available evidence from Aceh suggests that cash and in-kind assistance are complementary rather than competing methods of delivering assistance.

Health Insurance and Access to Care among Welfare Leavers

This analysis explores the effects of the 1996 welfare reform on health insurance coverage and access to care among former recipients of cash aid. Using panel data from the Women's Employment Study, which conducted five interviews between 1997 and 2003 in one Michigan county, we find that 25% of welfare leavers lacked health insurance coverage in fall 2003. Uninsured adults were significantly more likely than others to report that they could not afford a medical or dental visit during the year prior to the 2003 interview. Fixed-effect logistic regression analysis indicates that women who had been off the welfare rolls for at least 12 months (the duration of transitional Medicaid) were significantly more likely to be uninsured than women who had made more recent welfare exits, and were significantly more likely to report financial obstacles to the receipt of medical and dental care.

The effects of government transfers on monthly cycles in drug abuse, hospitalization and mortality

This paper analyzes the monthly patterns of adverse outcomes due to the consumption of illegal drugs by recipients of government transfer payments. We find evidence that certain subpopulations on government cash aid significantly increase their consumption of drugs when their checks arrive at the beginning of the month, and as a result, experience adverse events including hospitalization and death. Using data from California, we find that the overall rate of drug-related hospital admissions increases abruptly at the beginning of the month, with admissions increasing 23% during the first five days of the month. We find that this cycle is driven largely by recipients of Supplemental Security Income (SSI). SSI recipients also experience an abrupt 22% increase in within hospital mortality after receiving their checks. These findings suggest that “full wallets” adversely affect some aid recipients, and that policymakers should explore alternate disbursement regimes such as a staggered disbursement schedule or in-kind support that have the potential to reduce the rate of adverse events.

Cash or Food Aid? A General Equilibrium Analysis for Ethiopia

This article examines the relative effectiveness of cash and in‐kind food aid, using an economy‐wide modelling framework and a social accounting matrix constructed for Ethiopia. It argues that cash aid has larger positive effects on household welfare, with multiplier effects on households other than direct recipients, and that food aid provides a disincentive to local food production. However, where cash transfers cause food prices to rise, welfare losses may be suffered by those who are neither targeted nor beneficiaries. The highly aggregated nature of the model allows only a tentative policy recommendation in favour of cash transfers.

From Enabling to Bootstrapping: Welfare Workers' Views of Substance Abuse and Welfare Reform

In the United States, a trope of “deservingness” shapes policy related to public aid and substance abuse. In recent decades, poor people with substance use problems have increasingly been seen as “undeserving.” Federal welfare reform, passed in the mid-1990s, is an important exemplar of this trend. Welfare reform empowered line workers to directly and indirectly withhold aid from people with substance use problems. This paper uses in-depth interviews with workers to explore their views of these new policies. Workers generally applauded welfare reform's renewed attention to deservingness, including program emphases on client self-sufficiency and personal accountability and policies that time-limited cash aid and mandated working. They felt that these changes allowed them to stop “enabling” substance abuse and to encourage clients with alcohol and drug problems to bootstrap their way into jobs. Workers' embrace of these policy changes appears likely to shape how substance abuse problems are addressed within the welfare system.

Citizen, mother, worker: debating public responsibility for child care after the Second World War

During World War II, American women entered the workforce in unprecedented numbers, and many of them relied on federally funded child care programs. At the end of the war, working mothers vigorously protested the termination of child care subsidies. In Citizen, Mother, Worker , Emilie Stoltzfus traces grassroots activism and national and local policy debates concerning public funding of children's day care in the two decades after the end of World War II. Using events in Cleveland, Ohio; Washington, D.C.; and the state of California, Stoltzfus identifies a prevailing belief among postwar policymakers that women could best serve the nation as homemakers. Although federal funding was briefly extended after the end of the war, grassroots campaigns for subsidized day care in Cleveland and Washington met with only limited success. In California, however, mothers asserted their importance to the state's economy as productive citizens and won a permanent, state-funded child care program. In addition, by the 1960s, federal child care funding gained new life as an alternative to cash aid for poor single mothers. These debates about the public's stake in what many viewed as a private matter help illuminate America's changing social, political, and fiscal priorities, as well as the meaning of female citizenship in the postwar period. |Stoltzfus traces grassroots activism and national and local policy debates surrounding public funding of childcare services for working parents in the two decades after the end of World War II. Using case studies from Cleveland, Washington, D.C., and the state of California, she explains why we still don't have adequate child care in America. The book helps illuminate America's changing social, political, and fiscal priorities, as well as the meaning of female citizenship in the postwar period.

Becoming an Expert: The College Experiences of Welfare-to-Work Participants

Welfare-to-work initiatives drive social service recipients into education and training programs by linking program participation to social service benefits such as cash aid and housing. These programs are bringing greater numbers of single-parent women into community college settings. The author describes a qualitative study of eight female community college students who participated in the Job Opportunity and Basic Skills Program of the Department of Social Services in a southwestern state. The findings indicate that relationships women have with teachers and caseworkers can be distinguished by both growth promoting and hindering characteristics. College personnel validated the women's worth, and exposure to college created a shift in their identities: the women expressed the desire to establish new identities as students and future wage earners rather than as welfare recipients.

Wood Green to run exempted dog index:Cash aid for abandoned animals

Wood Green to run exempted dog index:Cash aid for abandoned animals

A Poorhouse in California, 1983: Oddity or Prelude?

A Poorhouse in California, 1983: Oddity or Prelude?

The Value, Cost, and Efficiency of American Food Aid

AbstractTheoretical frameworks were developed to estimate the value to recipient countries of food aid relative to untied cash aid, the cost to the donor country, and the social gain realized by channeling surplus productive capacity in the agricultural sector into food aid rather than reducing production. On the basis of these frameworks, the value, cost, and social gains associated with U. S. food aid during 1964–1966 were estimated. The value to recipient countries of food was estimated to be 80 percent of its world market value. The present value of repayments, interest payments, and transportation costs payable by food aid recipient countries was found to exceed the actual value of food aid under the prevailing dollar credit programs. Hence, a net transfer of resources from developing countries to the United States was found to occur. The cost to the United States of maintaining food aid programs during 1964–1966 was estimated to be approximately equal to the cost of reducing production by a similar amount, using voluntary land retirement programs. It was found that evaluation and pricing of U. S. food aid on the basis of the prevailing export prices results in a considerable overstatement of the actual value to the recipient countries and causes unduly high repayment obligations.

AEC Ponders Cash Aid for Radiation Processing

AEC Ponders Cash Aid for Radiation Processing