Impact Of Cash Transfers Research Articles

The Impact of Cash Transfers on Women's Empowerment: The Case of the Tanzania Social Action Fund

Social cash transfer (CT) programs are widely promoted around the world as effective instruments for poverty reduction. Unfortunately, they are rarely examined in a rigorous fashion to determine their purported impact. It is in this context that a mixed method was employed in the present study on a panel data set collected between 2015 and 2017 to examine the impact of the Tanzania Social Action Fund’s (TASAF) CT program on women’s empowerment. Results from a quasi‐experimental design show that TASAF targets poor households and does have an impact within its own sphere. However, the said impact does not spill over outside TASAF domain. These results are corroborated by qualitative data findings used in the study. We thus recommend that TASAF be accompanied by similar programs for a bigger and sustainable impact on women’s empowerment to be realized. Moreover, the study recommends that initiatives such as that of TASAF should go hand‐in‐hand with religious, legal, and cultural reforms.

IMPACT OF CASH TRANSFER ON POVERTY

<p><em>This research aims to generate empirical evidence on the impact of cash transfers on Poverty on households in Indonesia, using the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS) panel data in 2007 and 2014, and the method of Difference-in-differences with propensity score matching. This study estimates the impact of relief and benefits that do not receive assistance on Poverty. Results are expected to find that the provision of assistance (cash transfers) has a significant impact on poverty in terms of beneficiaries and who does not receive assistance, or viewed from a total of two (beneficiaries and who are not receiving assistance). It is found that the provision of assistance to the people who were targeted as shown to improve the welfare of beneficiaries, but have not been able to exceed the group that did not receive aid.</em><em> </em></p><p><strong><em>JEL Classification: </em></strong><em>I31, I32, I38</em></p><p><strong><em>Keywords</em></strong><em>: </em><em>Cash transfer, Difference-in-differences, Poverty, Propensity Score Matching</em><em></em></p>

Cash transfers and HIV/HSV-2 prevalence: A replication of a cluster randomized trial in Malawi.

IntroductionIn this paper we perform a replication analysis of “Effect of a cash transfer programme for schooling on prevalence of HIV and herpes simplex type 2 in Malawi: a cluster randomised trial” by Sarah Baird and others published in “The Lancet” in 2012. The original study was a two-year cluster randomized intervention trial of never married girls aged 13–22 in Malawi. Enumeration areas were randomized to either an intervention involving cash transfer (conditional or unconditional of school enrollment) or control. The study included 1708 Malawian girls, who were enrolled at baseline and had biological testing for HIV and herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2) at 18 months. The original findings showed that in the cohort of girls enrolled in school at baseline, the intervention had an effect on school enrollment, sexual outcomes, and HIV and HSV-2 prevalence. However, in the baseline school dropout cohort, the original study showed no intervention effect on HIV and HSV-2 prevalence.MethodsWe performed a replication of the study to investigate the consistency and robustness of key results reported. A pre-specified replication plan was approved and published online. Cleaned data was obtained from the original authors. A pure replication was conducted by reading the methods section and reproducing the results and tables found in the original paper. Robustness of the results were examined with alternative analysis methods in a measurement and estimation analysis (MEA) approach. A theory of change analysis was performed testing a causal pathway, the effect of intervention on HIV awareness, and whether the intervention effect depended on the wealth of the individual.ResultsThe pure replication found that other than a few minor discrepancies, the original study was well replicated. However, the randomization and sampling weights could not be verified due to the lack of access to raw data and a detailed sample selection plan. Therefore, we are unable to determine how sampling influenced the results, which could be highly dependent on the sample. In MEA it was found that the intervention effect on HIV prevalence in the baseline schoolgirls cohort was somewhat sensitive to model choice, with a non-significant intervention effect for HIV depending on the statistical model used. The intervention effect on HSV-2 prevalence was more robust in terms of statistical significance, however, the odds ratios and confidence intervals differed from the original result by more than 10%. A theory of change analysis showed no effect of intervention on HIV awareness. In a causal pathway analysis, several variables were partial mediators, or potential mediators, indicating that the intervention could be working through its effect on school enrollment or selected sexual behaviors.ConclusionsThe effect of intervention on HIV prevalence in the baseline schoolgirls was sensitive to the model choice; however, HSV-2 prevalence results were confirmed. We recommend that the results from the original published analysis indicating the impact of cash transfers on HIV prevalence be treated with caution.

The Impacts of Cash Transfers on Subjective Wellbeing and Poverty: The Case of Colombia

Cash transfer programs have been the main social policy in the fight against poverty and inequality in Latin-American countries. This paper analyzes the impacts of the program Mas Familias en Accion on the perception of poverty and subjective wellbeing in Colombia. The analyses are based on data from the Encuesta Nacional de Calidad de Vida between 2008 and 2016. Two empirical strategies were compared to account for the lack of randomness in groups of beneficiary and non-beneficiary families: (i) non-experimental designs (linear and nonlinear models with cross-sectional and pooled data); (ii) quasi-experimental designs (Propensity Score Matching and Inverse Probability Weighted Regression Adjustment). The results were robust to the different empirical strategies and emphasized that: (i) transfers increase the perception of food insecurity and subjective poverty; (ii) conditionalities involve positive impacts on different indicators of subjective wellbeing, especially health and education; (iii) general impacts on the perceptions of life are nonsignificant, as a result of divergent impacts on the dimensions of the subjective wellbeing of families.

The impact of cash transfers on social determinants of health and health inequalities in sub-Saharan Africa: a systematic review.

Cash transfers (CTs) are now high on the agenda of most governments in low- and middle-income countries. Within the field of health promotion, CTs constitute a healthy public policy initiative as they have the potential to address the social determinants of health (SDoH) and health inequalities. A systematic review was conducted to synthesise the evidence on CTs’ impacts on SDoH and health inequalities in sub-Saharan Africa, and to identify the barriers and facilitators of effective CTs. Twenty-one electronic databases and the websites of 14 key organizations were searched in addition to grey literature and hand searching of selected journals for quantitative and qualitative studies on CTs’ impacts on SDoH and health outcomes. Out of 182 full texts screened for eligibility, 79 reports that reported findings from 53 studies were included in the final review. The studies were undertaken within 24 CTs comprising 11 unconditional CTs (UCTs), 8 conditional CTs (CCTs) and 5 combined UCTs and CCTs. The review found that CTs can be effective in tackling structural determinants of health such as financial poverty, education, household resilience, child labour, social capital and social cohesion, civic participation, and birth registration. The review further found that CTs modify intermediate determinants such as nutrition, dietary diversity, child deprivation, sexual risk behaviours, teen pregnancy and early marriage. In conjunction with their influence on SDoH, there is moderate evidence from the review that CTs impact on health and quality of life outcomes. The review also found many factors relating to intervention design features, macro-economic stability, household dynamics and community acceptance of programs that could influence the effectiveness of CTs. The external validity of the review findings is strong as the findings are largely consistent with those from Latin America. The findings thus provide useful insights to policy makers and managers and can be used to optimise CTs to reduce health inequalities.

Cash Transfers and Temptation Goods

AbstractCash transfers have been demonstrated to improve education and health outcomes and alleviate poverty in various contexts. However, policy makers and others often express concern that poor households will use transfers to buy alcohol, tobacco, or other “temptation goods.” The income effect of transfers will increase expenditures if alcohol and tobacco are normal goods, but this may be offset by other effects, including the substitution effect and the effect of social messaging about the appropriate use of transfers. The net effect is ambiguous. This article reviews 19 studies with quantitative evidence on the impact of cash transfers on temptation good expenditure, as well as 11 studies that surveyed whether respondents reported they used transfers to purchase temptation goods. We conduct a meta-analysis to gauge the average impact of transfers on temptation goods. Results show that on average cash transfers have a significant negative effect on total expenditures on temptation goods, equal to −0.1...

Growing Up in Rural Assam, India: The Experiences of Young Women

This paper offers a picture of the life of young women in rural India, specifically in the state of Assam. It is drawn from a doctoral work that is in progress. India is one of the fastest growing economies in the world, yet nearly 69% of its population live in rural areas (Census of India, 2011). Numerous castes, creeds and religions co-exist in society with differing practices and opinions. Although conflicts of interest and incidents of violence occur from time to time, the ‘multi-cultural, multi-lingual, multi-dimensional’ Indian society still manages to hold itself together against all odds. Assam is a state with a predominantly rural makeup. The doctoral work drawn from for the purposes of this paper was conducted using a sample of 60 adolescent girls in school settings in Assam. The macro-philosophy of the research was to understand the impact of cash transfer in the form of scholarships on their overall wellbeing. The demographic profile of the state introduces the reader to the construct of the Assamese society. The three life sketches of young women narrated exemplify their dreams for a good life amidst challenges, both substantial and emotional. They show immense potential for a fulfilled life. There is need for support and guidance at different levels to enhance their capabilities. Importance of affective scaffolding at a personal level and affirmative action at governmental level is essential.

The impact of cash transfers on social determinants of health and health inequalities in Sub-Saharan Africa: a systematic review protocol.

BackgroundThere is increasing pressure to address the social determinants of health (SDoH) and health inequities through the implementation of culturally acceptable interventions particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) where health outcomes are generally poor. Available evaluation research on cash transfers (CTs) suggests that the programs may influence the wider determinants of health in SSA; yet, there has been no attempt to synthesize the evidence regarding their contribution to tackling the SDoH and health inequalities. To date, nearly all the reviews on CTs' impact on health have predominantly featured evidence from Latin America with limited transferability to the social, cultural, and political environments in SSA. Therefore, the aim of this study is to undertake a systematic review to assess the role of CTs in tackling the wider determinants of health and health inequalities in SSA.Methods/designA systematic review of published and unpublished literature on CTs’ impact on health and health determinants covering the period 2000–2016 will be undertaken. Studies will be considered for inclusion if they present quantitative or qualitative data, including all relevant study designs. The SDoH conceptual framework will be used to guide the data extraction process. EPPI Reviewer software will be used for data management and analysis. Studies included in the review will be analyzed by narrative synthesis and/or meta-analysis as appropriate for the nature of the data retrieved.DiscussionThis review will provide empirical evidence on the impact of CTs on SDoH to inform CT policy, implementation, and research in SSA. The protocol follows the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Protocols (PRISMA-P).Systematic review registrationThis protocol has been registered with the PROSPERO international prospective register of systematic reviews, reference CRD42015025015.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13643-016-0295-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Impact of Cash Transfer on Food Security: A Review

Impact of Cash Transfer on Food Security: A Review

Can cash transfers reduce child labor?

Cash transfers are a popular and successful means of tackling household vulnerability and promoting human capital investment. They can also reduce child labor, especially when it is a response to household vulnerability. But if not properly designed, cash transfers that promote children’s education can increase their economic activities in order to pay the additional costs of schooling. The efficacy of cash transfers may also be reduced if the transfers enable investment in productive assets that boost the returns to child labor. The impact of cash transfers must thus be assessed as part of the entire social protection system.

The Anti-Incumbent Effects of Conditional Cash Transfer Programs

AbstractScholars concur that conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs have a strong proincumbent effect among beneficiaries. Although no study has properly focused on the overall effect of cash transfers on incumbents' national vote shares, most scholars have deduced that this effect is positive; i.e., that cash transfers lead to the expansion of incumbents' electoral bases. This article analyzes survey data from nearly all Latin American countries and confirms that beneficiaries of CCT programs are more likely to support incumbents. However, it also shows that CCT programs may induce many voters who were previously incumbent supporters to vote for the opposition. As a consequence, the overall impact of cash transfers on incumbents' vote shares is indeterminate; it depends on the balance between both patterns of behavioral changes among voters. This study is the first to report evidence that cash transfer programs may have significant anti-incumbent effects.

The Impact of Cash Transfers on Food Security in Sub-Saharan Africa: Evidence, Design and Implementation

One of the priorities of the international community is alleviating food insecurity, as stated in Goal 2 of the recently approved 2030 Agenda: End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture. The region with the highest prevalence of food insecurity is sub-Saharan Africa (SSA); most of the efforts must be concentrated there. Food insecurity is mostly widespread among rural households who have either no land or only small plots, and who live in conditions of extreme poverty. Traditional agricultural/ economic interventions alone are unlikely to generate substantial improvements, as they are rarely specifically targeted to the poor. Yet social protection schemes, in particular the emerging cash transfers (CTs), have great potential. Evidence shows, however, that while these measures effectively expand food consumption and asset accumulation, thereby increasing households’ resilience, CTs must be linked to other interventions in order to sustainably graduate households out of food insecurity. What lessons can we learn from the empirical evidence in the region? · CTs have proven to be an effective tool for increasing households' calorie intake. Therefore, policy-makers should use them, particularly in this region. · International organizations, bilateral donors and national policy-makers should pay attention to four major design features of CT programmes: 1. Targeting: Some CTs do not reach the expected population and therefore have little effect on food security. CTs can use different targeting mechanisms: There is no one-size-fits-all solution. 2. Regularity of payments: Cash disbursements must be regular so that households can plan. Wherever several delays were experienced, the CTs were ineffective. 3. Transfer size: Monetary transfers should be at least equal to 20% of consumption by the poor. No positive benefits in terms of food security were detected when the amount of the transfer was below this threshold. However, CTs should not be large enough to increase social inequality and discourage work. 4. Political support: To ensure positive long-term effects and for beneficiaries to perceive them as regular programmes, CTs must be backed by strong political support. In SSA, programme ownership is often missing. · CTs alone cannot positively impact nutrition knowledge and nutrition/hygienic practices, and have been shown to have limited effects on diet and nutrition. In order for CTs to have long-lasting effects on nutrition, they must be complemented by other interventions such as nutrition education, food supplementation for vulnerable groups and specific economic policies. Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) offers an innovative model for connecting these policies. · Although it is not generally advisable to condition CTs to beneficiaries’ fulfilment of certain requirements, introducing soft conditions that link attendance at nutrition education courses to receiving CTs should be considered in SSA because they do not cost much or require large monitoring capacities.

TRANSFER PAYMENTS AND UPPER SECONDARY SCHOOL OUTCOMES: THE CASE OF LOW-INCOME FEMALE STUDENTS IN THAILAND

This study assesses the impact of cash transfers to low-income female Thai students on improving upper secondary school outcomes, as measured by grade point average (GPA) and transition to tertiary education. Utilizing official records from a charity organization providing substantial cash transfers to secondary students and student records from participating schools, we find the transfers have no effect on improving recipients’ GPAs compared to non-recipients. However, the scholarship recipients are 22% more likely to transition to university education than non-recipients and the presence of scholarship recipients in the classroom increases the likelihood of female non-recipients to attend university.

Income Redistribution and Poverty Reduction in Latin America: The role of social spending and taxation in achieving development goals

How much do social spending and taxation contribute to achieving the goals of poverty reduction and expanding the access to education and health services among the poor? Standard fiscal incidence analyses applied to Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay using a comparable methodology yields the following results. Direct taxes and cash transfers reduce inequality and poverty by non-trivial amounts in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay but less so in Bolivia, Mexico, and Peru. In Bolivia and Brazil indirect taxes more than offset the poverty-reducing impact of cash transfers. When one includes the effect of in-kind transfers in education and health valued at government costs, they reduce inequality in all countries by considerably more than cash transfers. Spending on public education and health services is broadly pro-poor, with the exception of tertiary education and the health component of the social security system.

Lifetime impact of cash transfer on fertility

In most OECD countries, fertility level is below the natural generation replacement level, and many OECD countries implement pro-natal policies, including direct cash transfer schemes. However, evaluations of the long-run impact of such policies are surprisingly rare. We investigate whether the cash transfer increases completed fertility, exploiting a quasi-experiment from a pro-natal cash transfer called Allowance for Newborn Children (ANC). We first devise a measure of ANC impact for different birth cohorts, because the policy lasted for a decade and affected cohorts with different intensities at different ages. The results show that ANC impact on fertility has little permanent component.

Cash Transfers and Child Labor

Cash transfer programs are widely used in settings where child labor is prevalent. Although many of these programs are explicitly implemented to improve children’s welfare, in theory their impact on child labor is undetermined. This paper systematically reviews the empirical evidence on the impact of cash transfers, conditional and unconditional, on child labor. The authors find no evidence that cash transfer interventions increase child labor in practice. On the contrary, there is broad evidence that conditional and unconditional cash transfers lower both children’s participation in child labor and their hours worked and that these transfers cushion the effect of economic shocks that may lead households to use child labor as a coping strategy. Boys experience particularly strong decreases in economic activities, whereas girls experience such decreases in household chores. The authors findings underline the usefulness of cash transfers as a relatively safe policy instrument to improve child welfare but also point to knowledge gaps, for instance regarding the interplay between cash transfers and other interventions, that should be addressed in future evaluations to provide detailed policy advice. The remainder of this review is organized as follows. Section 1 provides the necessary background. It heuristically describes why the effects of cash transfers on child labor are theoretically undetermined, and it introduces the procedure that we used to identify the relevant studies for this review. Section 2 discusses the impact of two subsets of unconditional cash transfers: programs designed to support poor households’ investments in children’s human capital and old age pension schemes. Section 3 discusses the average impact of conditional cash transfer schemes on the intensive and extensive margin of child labor, the impact of conditional cash transfers on child labor compared to their impact on school participation, heterogeneity by poverty, age, and gender, spillover effects, long-run effects, determinants of program effects, protection from shocks, and variations on the basic conditional cash transfer scheme. Section 4 discusses and concludes.

Poverty Reduction in Urban China: The Impact of Cash Transfers

The extent to which social protection programmes in general, and targeted programmes in particular, actually alleviate poverty has been a central issue in development debates for decades. The objective of this article is to contribute to the debate by empirically examining the poverty-alleviation effects of one of the largest targeted programmes in the world: the Minimum Living Standard Assistance (MLSA) or Dibao in China. Using newly available data on MLSA spending and a unique panel survey dataset covering the 1993 to 2009 period, this research investigates the impact of the MLSA on poverty alleviation. The analyses using fixed-effects and random-effects logit models and hierarchical liner models offer insights that go beyond the existing studies on the subject. Findings from the study confirm that targeted social protection programmes are an effective tool for reducing poverty.

The Impact of Cash Transfers on School Enrollment: Evidence from Ecuador

This paper presents evidence about the impact on school enrollment of a program in Ecuador that gives cash transfers to the 40 percent poorest families. The evaluation design consists of a randomized experiment for families around the first quintile of the poverty index and of a regression discontinuity design for families around the second quintile of this index, which is the program's eligibility threshold. This allows us to compare results from two different credible identification methods, and to investigate whether the impact varies with families' poverty level. Around the first quintile of the poverty index the impact is positive while it is equal to zero around the second quintile. This suggests that for the poorest families the program lifts a credit constraint while this is not the case for families close to the eligibility threshold.

Richer but Resented: What do Cash Transfers do to Social Relations?

Cash transfers are an increasingly important component of social protection systems in most countries. Usually, cash transfers are evaluated against their effects on poverty or human capital, with their impact on social relations within and between households relegated to discrete comments on ‘stigma’, ‘resentment’ and sharing, including reduction of remittances and other support. Using evidence from Oxford Policy Management's evaluations of cash transfer programmes in Malawi and Zimbabwe, we suggest reconceptualising cash transfers as ongoing processes of intervention in a complex system of social relations. Cash transfer interventions operate through and affect this system at each stage: awareness‐raising, targeting, payment, case management and monitoring and evaluation. We conclude that the impact of cash transfers on social relations is large and often negative. We argue that this is intrinsically important for wellbeing, but can also have negative consequences for material aspects of wellbeing, such as livelihoods.

Impact of Cash Transfer Programmes on School Attendance and Child Poverty: An Ex Ante Simulation for Sri Lanka

For countries assessing whether to implement a cash transfer programme, an ex-ante evaluation is vital to assess its potential impacts. This study simulates the impact of alternative cash transfer programmes on school attendance and poverty among Sri Lankan children. We find that cash transfer programmes targeting poor children would be the most cost-effective way to reduce child poverty and encourage school attendance. If means-testing is not feasible, then programmes targeting the children in households with at least three school-age children would provide a suitable second-best solution. Our findings suggest that even a limited programme budget can provide significant impacts.