I always reply by asking them to justify why they would give that good instead of cash. People sometimes ask me what I think about this or that in-kind transfer to households. In the simplified world of textbook economics, individuals’ choice sets are larger when they’re given cash without any strings attached, hence their welfare cannot be lower than if they were given CCTs (or in-kind transfers, which is really the same thing). I admire what they’re doing, which is something no others have dared to do: after some identification of the beneficiaries (through geographic targeting and proxy-means testing), they text a large sum of money, like US$500, via mobile phones using M-PESA. Over the next few paragraphs, I will summarize each intervention and the evidence associated with it – to draw out any parallels and contrast the differences. But, the three interventions that are lumped together in support of UCTs are, in fact, quite different from each other. In many, but not all, of these pieces, these interventions are discussed together in a rather clumsy attempt to usher in a new era in development aid, in which things are as simple as dropping money into poor communities.
labeled cash transfers to families with school-aged children to improve primary school completion in rural Morocco). It doesn’t look like the traditional media outlets are alone in propagating this: see this and this from This American Life and NYT Magazine on GiveDirectly’s work (large lump-sum unconditional cash transfers, or UCTs, to the poor in Kenya) Chris Blattman here, here, and here mainly on his study with Fiala and Martinez (large grants to groups of unemployed youth for skills training and microenterprise formation in Uganda) and IPA blog and here and here on the new study by Benhassine et al.
I can’t go more than a few minutes through my inbox, or my Twitter, Facebook, and RSS feeds without running into yet another piece about the promise of cash transfers.
0 kommentar(er)
