Innocenti Working Papers

Among policymakers, a common perception surrounding the effects of cash transfer programmes, particularly unconditional programmes targeted to families with children, is that they induce increased fertility. We evaluate the Zambian Child Grant Programme, a large-scale government unconditional cash transfer targeted to families with a child under the age of five and examine impacts on fertility and household composition. The evaluation was a cluster randomized control trial, with data collected over four years from 2010 to 2014. Our results indicate there are no programme impacts on overall fertility. In addition, among young women under 25 years fertility actually decreased after 36 months, but impacts disappeared after 48 months. Our results contribute to a small evidence base demonstrating that there are no unintended incentives related to fertility due to cash transfers.

Childhood malnutrition remains a significant global problem with an estimated 162 million children under 5 suffering from stunted growth. Social protection interventions, in particular cash transfer programmes, have the potential to contribute to the improvement of child nutrition. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the impacts of cash transfer programmes on the immediate and underlying determinants of child nutrition, including the most recent evidence from impact evaluations across sub-Saharan Africa. It adopts the UNICEF extended model of care conceptual framework of child nutrition and highlights evidence on the main elements of the framework – food security, care and health care. The paper concludes that, while an increasing number of studies have stressed the positive role of cash transfer programmes in increasing resources for food, health and care, the evidence to date on the immediate determinants of child nutrition is mixed with respect to whether cash transfers can positively impact growth-related outcomes among children, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Key gaps that should be addressed in future research include cash transfer impacts on more proximate nutrition-related outcomes such as children’s dietary diversity, as well as caregiver behaviours, intra-household violence, and stress, all of which have implications for child health and well-being.

Establishing “what works under what conditions” is becoming a mantra in the development context, both in academia and among international development organizations. This, however, is not an issue of the technical modalities of service provision alone. Just as important is their contextual framing, including analyzing real time governance factors. It is necessary to understand and address bottlenecks that impede the success of an intervention, or that make an intervention that works well in one context unrealistic or inappropriate in another. This means having an analysis of institutions and the power relations within and between them, as well as the incentives motivating both elites and the behaviour of service users (or non-users, as the case may be). Coordination is a critical governance issue. UNICEF’s Monitoring Results for Equity approach identifies coordination as a determinant of results for children, alongside other governance issues such as budgeting, management and legislation. This is why the Office of Research has partnered with Guy Peters, Professor of American Governance at the University of Pittsburgh, to carry out two case studies on bottlenecks in coordination, of which this study in Ghana is the first.

This study provides the first estimates of national multidimensional child deprivation rates in Bosnia and Herzegovina using the National Multiple Overlapping Deprivation Analysis (MODA) pioneered by UNICEF. A participatory national process led to the selection of two age groups and a set of deprivation dimensions for each group. The analysis uses data from the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) 2011-2012 for children aged 0 to 4 and the Expanded Household Budget Survey (EHBS) 2011 for children aged 5 to 15. The dimensions analysed for children under five are: Nutrition, Health, Child Development, Violent Discipline, Information Access, and Housing, while for older children seven dimensions were used: Nutrition, Clothing, Educational Resources, Leisure, Social Participation, Information Access and Housing. This study shows that almost all children aged 0 to 4 (98.1%) are deprived in at least one dimension, and a third (33.2%) are deprived in four or more dimensions at a time. Almost three out of four children aged 5 to 15 (73.8%) are deprived in at least one dimension, while fewer than one in four (22.8%) are deprived in three or more dimensions. Poor children are more likely to be deprived in any of the dimensions studied and in any number of dimensions simultaneously. However, the degree of overlap between deprivation and poverty is moderate, with only 13.8% of 5-15-year-olds both poor and deprived in at least three out of seven dimensions studied. Some deprivations show a higher degree of sensitivity to household consumption (e.g. clothing and nutrition), while others are not as readily amenable to increasing household expenditure (e.g. information and housing). Therefore, policies aimed at reducing child poverty and deprivation need to improve both the spending power of households and the availability of services/infrastructure in local areas.

This study provides the first ever estimates of national child deprivation rates in Mali using the Multiple Overlapping Deprivations Approach (MODA) pioneered by UNICEF. Deprivations are defined according to the age of the child. A participatory national process led to the selection of four distinct age groups and a set of deprivation dimensions for each age group. The age groups are 0-23 months, 24-59 months, 5-14 years and 15-17 years. The younger age groups have 7 dimensions of deprivation while the older age groups have 6 dimensions. The national child deprivation rate is 50%, slightly higher than the national (monetary) child poverty rate of 46%. The deprivation rate is based on a threshold of 4 for children 0-59 months and 3 for children 5-17 years. The deprivation headcount is 60% in rural areas versus 16% in urban areas. The highest deprivation headcounts are found in Kidal (73%), Tombouctou (72%) and Mopti (68%). The headcount is 9% in Bamako. The overlap of children who are both poor and deprived is 29% of all children, hence not all children who are deprived are living in poor households as defined by the national poverty line. Only 58% of children who are deprived live in poor households. Similarly, only 62% of children in poor households are multidimensionally deprived. Consequently, policies that are targeted exclusively on monetary poverty will miss children who are deprived. Across regions in Mali the correlation between deprivation and poverty rates is uneven. The highest monetary poverty rate is in Sikasso (86%) where the child deprivation rate is around the national average. On the other hand, regions with the highest deprivation rates (Kidal, Tombouctou) have poverty rates of only 16% and 33% respectively. These patterns are related to the level of services available for families with children in each region and underscore the fact that low levels of poverty do not automatically translate into reductions in child deprivation. The relationship between being deprived and monetary poverty is strongest in rural areas for all age groups. An increase of USD 1 per person per day would reduce the probability of being deprived by 25 percentage points in rural areas. The specific dimensions most strongly linked with income are health for younger children and education for older children. Beyond income, maternal education is an important determinant of childhood deprivation, especially in rural areas. Children 0-59 months in rural areas whose mothers have attained secondary schooling are 21 percentage points less likely to be deprived; the comparable figure for older children 5-17 years of age is 20 percentage points.

This paper analyses multidimensional child deprivation across thirty countries in sub-Saharan Africa, applying the Multiple Overlapping Deprivation Analysis (MODA) methodology that measures various aspects of child poverty. The methodology has been adapted to the particular needs of this cross-country comparative study, standardising the indicators and thresholds to allow comparability across countries. Child poverty is defined as non-fulfilment of children’s rights to survival, development, protection and participation, anchored in the Convention on the Rights of the Child. DHS and MICS household survey data is used, taking the child as unit of analysis and applying a life-cycle approach when selecting dimensions and indicators to capture the different deprivations children experience at different stages of their life. The main objective of the paper is to present a direct method of child poverty measurement analysing deprivations experienced by the child. The paper goes beyond mere deprivation rates and identifies the depth of child poverty by analysing the extent to which the different deprivations are experienced simultaneously. The analysis is done across thirty countries in sub-Saharan Africa that together represent 78% of the region’s total population. The findings show that 67% of all the children in the thirty countries suffer from two to five deprivations crucial to their survival and development, corresponding to 247 million out of a total of 368 million children below the age of 18 living in these thirty countries. For the other 15 countries of sub-Saharan Africa where the CC-MODA analysis could not be carried out, predictions of child deprivation rates have been made using GDP per capita, urban population share, and population size. Based on the actual as well as the predicted multidimensional deprivation rates, just under 300 million children in sub-Saharan Africa are multidimensionally poor, being deprived in two to five dimensions crucial for their survival and development. The findings are also compared with other existing poverty measures, showing that for the countries included in the analysis, monetary poverty measures (both the international $1.25 a day and national poverty measures) are weak predictors of multidimensional child poverty. The study finds stronger correlation between multidimensional child deprivation and GDP per capita. The paper underlines that monetary poverty and multidimensional deprivation are conceptually different, complementary poverty measures and that there are advantages in measuring both simultaneously, especially when measuring child poverty.

Mounting pressure from the financial markets prompted most industrialized countries to engage in fiscal consolidation since 2010-2011, with social transfers among the most popular targets. To analyse the effect of the economic crisis and the ensuing fiscal stimulus and/or consolidation measures on children’s living conditions across the OECD and/or the EU, this paper investigates changes in disposable incomes of low-wage households with children since 2008, with a particular focus on family-related benefits. It uses the model family method coupled with tax-benefit simulation techniques for the period 2008-2012. The paper also summarises qualitatively significant changes to family-related benefits, some of which are too recent to have been included in the publicly available tax-benefit simulation models. Family benefits have been particularly hard hit between 2008 and 2012. Their real value declined for lone parent households (with two school-age children) earning 20% of the average wage in 20 out of 37 countries, although in nine of them, increases in housing benefits, in-work benefits or social assistance made up for it at least partially. Taking all social transfers into account, the households studied saw their net incomes fall in real terms due to benefit cuts in nine out of 37 countries: Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Portugal, Republic of Korea, Slovakia, Spain, and the UK.

Chile and Mexico experienced extraordinary economic and social improvements over the first decade of the twenty-first century. Nonetheless, the 2008–2009 international crisis dramatically affected these two economies via real channels. Both countries reacted to the external shock by implementing several measures. However – thanks to the policies implemented during the period before the crisis – the Chilean government enjoyed more fiscal space and was able to introduce a stimulus package twice as large the Mexican one. In particular, Chile supported families with children via the expansion of the main social protection programme, additional cash transfers to the poorest families with children and passive labour market measures. In contrast, the worsening of fiscal conditions pushed Mexico into a fiscal consolidation process since 2010. As a result, child poverty dropped in Chile while it rose sharply in Mexico.

The goal of this paper is to monitor the impact of the Great Recession on child well-being in countries of the European Union. We use data from the EU-28 plus Iceland, Norway, Switzerland and Turkey to document the change in children’s well-being from 2007/8-2012/3. We classify countries into ‘least’, ’moderately’ and ‘most’ exposed to the global recession and document trends in well-being outcomes for each of the three groups. We find a strong correlation between exposure to the crisis and reductions in child well-being since 2007/8. Trends in labour market outcomes for young people aged 15-24 are notable in that while declines are sharpest among countries most affected by the crisis, there is a decline in all countries, even those least affected. We also discuss individual countries’ performance on a selection of child outcomes through the use of League Tables (LT); these LTs rank countries, showing top and bottom performers, based on the progress/setback experienced over the period 2007/8-2012/3. These results should be interpreted as early evidence on child well-being during the crisis, since the study period covers only up to 2012/3 for most indicators, and only through 2011 for monetary poverty.