The Design of Conditional Cash Transfers: Experiences from Argentina's Universal Child Allowance

Conditional cash transfers (CCTs) have spread rapidly in developing countries in the past decade. While there is extensive literature assessing their impacts health, education and other outcomes, little attention has been paid to beneficiaries' subjective experiences of CCT design. This article addresses this issue by exploring how beneficiaries of Argentina's flagship CCT, the Universal Child Allowance, perceive the programme's unique design features. We find male and female beneficiaries tend to support targeted transfers to female carers, and that confusion about payment schedules has important implications for beneficiary engagement. Analysis of these findings offers useful insights into how CCT programme design may affect outcomes.     

Have cash transfers succeeded in reaching the poor in Latin America and the Caribbean?

We present original estimates of the quality of targeting of conditional cash transfer (CCT) and non‐contributory pension (NCP) programmes in Latin America and the Caribbean. Our contribution is novel because we use both national and international poverty lines; provide differentiated estimates for urban and rural areas; and compare the CCT and NCP programmes. We show that leakage to the non‐poor coexists with pervasive under‐coverage of all poor, including the extreme poor. On average, the CCTs cover only 50.5% of the extreme poor in households with children under 18 years of age. Similarly, the NCPs cover only 50.9% of the extreme poor in households with elderly members who do not receive a contributory pension. At the same time, 40.4% of CCT beneficiaries and 50.1% of NCP beneficiaries are not poor, highlighting the potential need for re‐targeting and re‐certification. In most countries, re‐targeting could produce a substantial double benefit in terms of poverty reduction and fiscal savings.     

How could conditional cash transfer programme conditionalities reinforce vulnerability? Non‐compliers and policy implementation gaps in Uruguay's Family Allowances

Influential research shows that conditionalities could incentivize recipients of conditional cash transfer programmes (CCTs) to send their children to school and to regular health check‐ups. However, a growing literature is elucidating the risks of conditional transfers, from both a philosophical and an empirical perspective. This article highlights the varied deficits that have accompanied the implementation process in some Latin American countries, as well as the consequences that these deficits might have on the beneficiaries. In particular, it suggests that, rather than reducing vulnerability by improving access to services, conditionalities could be reinforcing vulnerability among non‐compliers if non‐compliance leads to the immediate suspension of the cash transfer and if this sanction is poorly implemented. While this hypothesis has gained attention and is part of both an academic and a political debate, empirical research around it is scarce. This article is an attempt to start filling this gap by focusing on the implementation process of conditionalities in a CCT programme in Uruguay (Family Allowances) and how this is experienced by a group of recipients who failed to comply with the conditionalities and were sanctioned with the suspension of the benefit. In particular, it identifies the main reasons why these beneficiaries did not comply, how they experience the sanction and how they managed—when they do—to apply for the benefit to be restored. Based on a qualitative design of in‐depth interviews, it provides empirical evidence to unpack causal relationships linking conditionalities to increased vulnerability among non‐compliers. Our findings offer evidence on the role played by the conditionalities in reinforcing vulnerability and the possible causal mechanisms that could be operating between both phenomena. This picture of policy implementation constraints that could lead conditionalities to reinforce vulnerability among recipients could be relevant to policy‐makers having to deal with non‐compliance and managing sanctions in CCTs.     

Reducing Child Labour Through Conditional Cash Transfers: Evidence from Nicaragua's Red de Protección Social

Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programmes, providing eligible households with periodic cash payments, contingent on their children's adherence to school enrolment and attendance requirements, hold considerable promise for reducing levels of child labour across the developing world. This article presents the results of an analysis of a CCT programme in Nicaragua, Red de Protección Social, and compares them with those of other CCT programmes, discussing how the structure of each programme's incentives, including differences in targeting, subsidy amounts and educational requirements, contributes to the variation in their effectiveness at reducing child labour.     

Designing home care benefits: the range of options and experience

This article presents a framework identifying important home care benefit design decisions and reviews existing designs that have been adopted in practice. Four basic designs were identified, based on a review of 55 home care benefits drawn from public programs in the United States and foreign countries, and from private long-term care insurance policies in the United States. Three of these designs-service entitlements, managed-service benefits, and cash disability allowances--have each been adopted by public programs in the United States and abroad, and by private insurance policies in the United States. A fourth design--individualized cash benefits--has been adopted in only one experimental program. The designs observed in practice are remarkably varied, providing evidence that many alternative designs are feasible. Experimentation, particularly with cash disability allowances, is needed to determine the relative costs and benefits of various designs.     

Between power and perception: Understanding youth perspectives in participatory monitoring and evaluation (PM&E) in Ghana

Participatory monitoring and evaluation (PM&E) approaches have been touted as an important concept for local participation in social interventions programmes. Utilizing a process analysis approaches, the PM&E data gathered through key informant interviews, formal surveys, and policy frameworks were analyzed. The study revealed three dominant power struggles between youth and programme implementers in three districts at the Greater Accra region, Ghana. The first and pervasive form of power dynamics involves the youth and programme implementers. The second involves a variety of arrangements with the government on one hand and implementers and youth on the other side. The third is who qualifies to be a beneficiary and for that matter participate in the PM&E. In these three forms of power struggles the paper reveals superior implementers control of who participate in the programme PM&E and at what stage in the process. The power imbalance between programme implementer and target beneficiaries impeded the level of beneficiaries’ participation in the PM&E.     

Women’s status and qualitative perceptions of a cash assistance programme in Raqqa Governorate,Syria

ABSTRACT

Cash and voucher assistance is an efficient way to deliver assistance in emergency settings, and evidence demonstrates that cash programmes have consistent positive impacts on food security and other health and economic outcomes in these contexts. Nevertheless, while evidence from development settings shows that cash has the potential to reduce intimate partner violence and increase empowerment for women and girls, there is a dearth of rigorous evidence from acute humanitarian settings. In response to this evidence gap, the International Rescue Committee conducted an evaluation of a cash programme in Raqqa Governorate, Syria. The aim was to examine the effect of a cash for basic needs programme on outcomes of violence against women, and women’s empowerment. This article draws on qualitative data from interviews with 40 women at the end of the cash programme. It offers evidence of potential increased tension and abuse within both the community and the household for some women whose families received cash, as well as potential increased social protection through repayment of debts and economic independence for others. Both negative and positive effects could be seen. While the objective of the cash programme was not to influence underlying power dynamics, this research shows it is necessary to integrate gender-sensitive approaches into programme design and monitoring to reduce risk to women of diverse identities.     

Supply of schooling and dropout rates: Evidence from the Oportunidades programme in Mexico

In this article we provide evidence that measures of school supply, such as quantity and quality at the local level, are important predictors of dropout behaviour among conditional cash transfer beneficiaries in Mexico. We use administrative records of the Oportunidades programme in both rural and urban areas to follow the schooling trajectory of a cohort of students from sixth grade to high school. Under half of rural beneficiaries attending sixth grade make it to the tenth grade. Our regression analysis indicates that the absence of a junior high school in a locality increases the probability of dropping out after sixth grade by 6.8 percentage points; the absence of a high school increases the probability of dropping out after ninth grade by 12.2 percentage points. This means that 16% of all rural sixth‐grade students would enter tenth grade if they had junior high and high schools in their localities. Attending a low‐quality junior high school increases the probability of dropping out after ninth grade by 13 percentage points in rural areas and 7.6 percentage points in urban areas.     

Medicare and the affordable care act

The recently enacted Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act made modest changes to improve Medicare and obtained a substantial share of funding for the Act's broader reforms from future spending reductions in the program. Drug benefits and preventive services were improved. While painful, the spending reductions will have only moderate impacts on beneficiaries and should help achieve the goals of health care reform: encouraging better primary and preventive care, making providers conscious of finding ways to increase the productivity of care delivered and changing the relative levels of payment across certain providers. Additional costs to beneficiaries will arise from changes in private plan payments and increasing income-related premiums.     

A NEW MONETARIST MODEL OF FIAT AND E‐MONEY

We develop a dual payment New Monetarist model, where an electronic money (e‐purse) competes with fiat money (cash). The two payment instruments differ in terms of security, cost, and acceptability. Strategic complementarities lead to multiple monetary equilibria. We establish the conditions under which e‐money can coexist with, or replace fiat money, and explain the reasons for the e‐purse failure/success in a few countries. We also compare welfare when one currency or both circulate. When the risk of theft of cash is endogenous, e‐money cannot replace cash entirely; however, low inflation can facilitate the adoption of e‐money in parallel with fiat money. (JEL D83, E40, E50)     

Beneficiaries’ aspirations to permanent employment within the South African Working for Water Programme

The South African Working for Water (WfW) programme is a short-term public works programme (PWP) focused on clearing invasive alien plants, while training and empowering the marginalised poor to find employment. Furthermore, it aims to develop independent, entrepreneurial contractors who should ‘exit’ from the programme into the broader labour market. However, evidence indicates that many beneficiaries have become financially dependent on this employment, and find it difficult to search for alternatives. Understanding the reasons for this dependence from the perspective of the beneficiaries of this PWP is crucial to align such projects to the actual needs of the beneficiaries, but these have not yet been considered from a sociological perspective. This article reports on data collected, through face-to-face interviews, on WfW beneficiaries’ aspirations to permanent employment in four projects in the Winelands and Overberg districts of the Western Cape. It presents the novel finding that the social structures within projects themselves seem to create a need to remain in the WfW programme. In addition, a misalignment between these projects’ implementation and beneficiaries’ aspirations to financial stability (associated with permanent employment in WfW) is highlighted. The authors argue that WfW should respond to these aspirations, rather than pursue the ostensibly unrealistic aim of creating independent entrepreneurs. Finally, the implications of these findings for PWPs globally, and their concerns regarding the inadvertent creation of beneficiary dependence, are outlined.     

INTEGRATED HOUSEHOLD SURVEYS: AN ASSESSMENT OF U.S. METHODS AND AN INNOVATION

We present a vision for improving household financial surveys by integrating responses from questionnaires more completely with financial statements and combining them with payments data from diaries. Integrated household financial accounts—balance sheet, income statement, and statement of cash flows—are used to assess the degree of integration in leading U.S. household surveys, focusing on inconsistencies in measures of the change in cash. Diaries of consumer payment choice can improve dynamic integration. Using payments data, we construct a statement of liquidity flows: a detailed analysis of currency, checking accounts, prepaid cards, credit cards, and other payment instruments, consistent with conventional cash flow measures and the other financial accounts. (JEL D12, D14, E41, E42)     

The ‘New Recipients’: Or Whatever Happened to Public Welfare?

Recipients of public welfare are usually understood to be the prime beneficiaries of the public welfare system. But an analysis of the system reveals that the payments to both service and medical providers have overtaken the cash payments. These provider groups, in point of fact, have become the “new recipients” and have a strong stake in the system and the cash reimbursement formulas. The juxtaposition of the medical and the income maintenance systems raise serious policy questions as to the advisability of keeping the systems together.     

Out-of-pocket vs. out-of-investment in financial advisory fees: Evidence from the lab

The implications of the method of payment to financial advisors on the behavior of individuals are of interest to economists and regulators around the globe. This paper uses an experimental approach to compare two common alternative forms of payment. The first is “out-of-pocket” (an upfront payment from a checking account), and the second is “out-of-investment” (a deferred payment from an investment portfolio account). We document that for the same financial advice, the subjects in the first treatment were willing to pay on average 25 per cent less than the subjects in the second treatment – payment following an investment outcome knowledge, where the payment was framed in terms of gains. We introduce an additional out-of-pocket payment structure where the actual payment is deferred until after the subject discovers the outcome of the investment. Thus, the design can be broken down into two distinct possible effects, an out-of-pocket vs. out-of-investment framing effect and a pre-outcome vs. post-outcome timing effect. We find that the timing effect is the key element: across out-of-pocket payment structures, the subjects were willing to pay significantly less in the pre-outcome treatment than their counterparts were in the post-outcome treatment. Our results highlight the difference between post-service and pre-service payments in a broader context, and provide an explanation for why allowing late payment, after the service has been performed and its outcome revealed, may increase the ex-ante willingness to pay for the service.     

A formative evaluation of the recovery public works programme in Blantyre City,Malawi

Public works programmes (PWPs) are popular social protection instruments in the context of chronic poverty but very little has been published in the way of implementation and outcomes of these programmes. This paper presents a formative process and outcome evaluation of the recovery PWP in Blantyre City, Malawi. The evaluation used longitudinal household survey data of PWP beneficiaries, programme records and interview responses from programme staff and community leaders. Largely, the process evaluation findings showed an agreement between actual and planned activities. The outcome evaluation found indications that the PWP community assets offered some potential benefits to the communities, and that PWP wages allowed the beneficiaries to purchase some food. This however, did not translate into more meals per day, nor did the earnings prevent the decline in household assets as expected. Given a plausible PWP theory and high implementation fidelity, the PWP wage rate or number of days was either just enough to smooth participant income, or insufficient altogether, to enable achievement of more distal outcomes.     

Cash Transfers and Children's Education and Labour among Malawi's Poor

This article examines the impact on children's education and labour of monthly cash grants targeted on ultra‐poor households and designed to reduce poverty and enable families to invest in human development. It conducts a randomised community trial, with baseline and endline surveys of intervention and control households; verifies school enrolment; and completes key‐informant interviews and focus‐group discussions. Compared with non‐beneficiaries, intervention children experienced a 5 percentage point difference in enrolment, higher educational expenditures, fewer absences, and a 10 percentage point decrease in labour outside the home. Qualitative data confirm the quantitative findings. Transfers to poor households had a positive impact. However, the Malawian educational system needs to be improved for short‐term impacts to lead to long‐term development in human capital.     

“It's practical, but no more controllable”: Social representations of the electronic purse in Austria

The electronic purse (chip-card) is promoted as an option offering consumers an easy means of payment. It also offers advantages to traders and banks by reducing transaction costs. However, successful launching of the electronic purse depends mainly on consumers' acceptance, which in the past was very low in Austria. We study consumers' acceptance of the electronic purse, cash and established non-cash payment systems by analysing social representations of payment facilities. Semantic contents of associations raised in response to the stimulus words “means of payment in general”, “cash”, “cheque”, “ATM-card”, “credit-card” and “electronic purse” have been analysed. Overall, 264 people were studied applying two techniques: the “associative network” and the “conceptual network”. It is shown that means of payment are categorised on two dimensions: cash and non-cash. Non-cash payment facilities are characterised by high abstraction levels, and loss of subjective control over expenditures. The electronic purse is perceived as highly dissimilar to other means of payments.     

Measuring consumer perceptions of payment mode

Although existing scales assess perceptions of money per se, none capture the mental and emotional experiences that the corporal quality of the payment mode generates. Historical and sensory associations with payment modes generate differential cognitive and emotional sensitivity in mental accounts, and influence the type, value and amount of products purchased. Although an increasing amount of attention has been devoted to the influence of payment mode on spending behavior, and little effort has been devoted to developing an appropriate measurement scale to capture consumers’ cognitive and emotional associations with payment modes. To address this gap in the literature, this study developed a conceptual and empirical framework with a sample of approximately 800 participants, and shows how the constructs and the scales capture perceptions of payment modes. The 19-item PPM scale represents four dimensions: emotions relating to cash and card based payment modes, social and personal gratification and money management. The PPM measurement scale demonstrates acceptable reliability and shows that consumer perceptions of payment modes influence spending behavior and predict ownership of financial cards in possession. The scale is useful in understanding consumer cognitive and emotional associations with payment modes, particularly the use of “owned money” and how these associations impact on payment mode choice.     

Fertiliser Subsidies and Social Cash Transfers as Complementary or Competing Instruments for Reducing Vulnerability to Hunger: The Case of Malawi

Fertiliser subsidies and social transfers are complementary instruments for reducing vulnerability to hunger in poor agrarian countries. The former act on production and aim to reduce food insecurity through yield growth, while the latter tackle food‐entitlement failures directly, by providing either food itself or the cash to purchase food to selected beneficiaries. The policies compete for scarce public resources, and each represents an ‘opportunity cost’ compared to the other. Using Malawi to illustrate these comparisons, this article shows that a mix of policies can be affordable, allowing for strategic choice over the portfolio most likely to achieve a reliable consumption floor for the most vulnerable rural people.     

Differences between paid and unpaid social services for beneficiaries

In many Western welfare states, social work services that have traditionally been provided by paid employees are being replaced by family support, community support, informal networks, and volunteering. For the field of social work, it is relevant to know what it matters to beneficiaries whether services are provided by volunteers or by paid employees. The central question of this article is therefore as follows: What are the differences between unpaid and paid social services for beneficiaries? The article is based on literature review and focus groups. Our results suggest that beneficiaries do experience some differences regarding the advantages of volunteer services for beneficiaries that can be summarized in three propositions: (1) services provided by volunteers are more relational than are services provided by paid employees, and they are therefore perceived as more equal, flexible and sincere. (2) The effects of volunteer services for beneficiaries are not exclusively positive. (3) Although particular tasks may appear to be interchangeable to some extent, the relative advantages of a given task depend upon whether it is performed by a paid worker or by a volunteer. Additional research is needed in order to provide further validation.