Innocenti Working Papers

Accumulated evidence from dozens of cash transfer programmes across the world suggest that there are few interventions that can match the range of impacts and cost-effectiveness of a small, predictable monetary transfer to poor families in developing countries. These results lead many policymakers to consider cash transfer programmes the ‘gold-standard’ in anti-poverty policy with some even advocating for benchmarking all development interventions against what would have been accomplished with a direct cash transfer. However, the benchmarking argument rests on the accumulated evidence from many programmes that highlights the range of potential benefits of cash transfers, while each individual study typically focused on only one programme and one outcome. This article is the first to provide comprehensive impact results of an unconditional cash transfer from one programme, covering many outcomes in poverty, social and economic domains. We implement an experimental design to evaluate the Zambian Government’s Child Grant, an unconditional cash transfer to families with small children in three of the poorest districts of Zambia. We document the broad impacts of the programme, including on consumption, livelihood strengthening, material welfare of children, young child feeding, investment in assets, productive activities and housing after two years, making this one of the first studies to demonstrate both protective and productive impacts of a national unconditional cash transfer programme. However impacts in areas such as child nutritional status and schooling depend on initial conditions of the household, suggesting that cash alone is not enough to solve all constraints faced by these poor, rural households. Even an unconditional cash transfer programme with a wide range of impacts does not produce effects for all outcomes, suggesting that complementary programmes to achieve specific outcomes will still be necessary even in the most successful cases.

During the late 2000s, European countries were affected by an economic crisis considered the most severe since the Second World War. Although the nature of the shock and its evolution were different across countries, the reactions of governments were quite similar. Indeed, governments implemented stimulus fiscal packages in the early stages of the crisis; nonetheless, the worsening of economic conditions plus the pressures coming from financial markets pushed them into a process of fiscal consolidation. This paper shows that these different policy reactions provoked important consequences for people’s living standards. If the increase in social transfers and the reduction of the tax burden partially compensated the drop in private income over the period 2008-2010, the implementation of the austerity packages amplified the negative consequences of the economic recessions. Moreover, the policies implemented by governments during the austerity period deepened inequality. In some countries – such as Estonia, Greece and Spain - the burden of the adjustment fell on the bottom of the distribution producing a deterioration of living conditions for the most vulnerable. Lastly, government interventions worsened the conditions of the poorest children in countries such as France and Hungary.

This initial exploratory study examines the governance and finance of ECS in three countries using an in-depth qualitative approach. The methodologies and tools provide an innovative strategy built upon the literature of governance and finance to understand how to improve access, quality and equity of ECS. Cross-country analyses reveal key emerging trends in ECD systems governance at different levels and around crucial dimensions, including actors, coordination, policy architectures, and local-level perspectives. The findings of this study have implications for strengthening systems of global ECD systems research.

Hungary and Iceland were among the countries most affected by the recent macroeconomic shock. Although they suffered a similar GDP drop and started from much the same fiscal conditions, their respective governments decided to follow different strategies of adjustment. Each country cut public spending according to different priorities. However, the most important differences are related to the revenue side. While the Hungarian government implemented a flat tax reform, the Icelandic government replaced the previous flat tax system with a progressive one increasing the participation in the fiscal consolidation process for high income groups. These two opposite adjustment strategies produced different economic and social outcomes. In both countries, the primary balance turned positive and the level of debt on GDP started to decrease. Nonetheless, while Iceland fully met the objectives of the IMF programme, the worsening of economic conditions forced the Hungarian government to ask for additional help from the EU and the IMF in 2012. In terms of distribution, social transfers contributed to reduce inequality in both countries, while the different tax strategies operated in opposite ways. Indeed, the results show that the Hungarian tax system became more regressive while the 2010 Iceland’s Tax Reform contributed to reduce inequality by nearly two points.

The risk and time preferences of individuals as well as their subjective expectations regarding the future are likely to play an important role in choice behaviour. Measurement of these individual characteristics in large-scale surveys has been a recent development and empirical evidence on their associations with behaviour remains limited. We summarize the results of measuring individuals’ attitudes towards inter-temporal choice, risk, and the future in a large-scale field survey in Kenya. We also examine the impact of a cash transfer programme on these preferences and expectations. We find very low rates of inconsistency in interpreting questions on time and risk preferences. Cash transfers alone do not appear to impact time discounting or risk aversion, but they do have an important impact on subjective well-being measures and on future perceptions of quality of life. These in turn may affect forward-looking decisions such as financial and human capital investment, although this is not explored in this paper and remains part of the future research agenda.

The Multiple Overlapping Deprivation Analysis for the European Union (EU-MODA) compares the material well-being of children across the EU member states, using data from the child material deprivation module of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) 2009. Embedded in the multidimensional poverty measurement literature, EU-MODA applies internationally accepted standards for the construction of indicators and dimensions of child well-being. The analysis ranges from indicator and dimension headcounts, overlaps between several dimensions, decomposition of the adjusted multidimensional deprivation headcounts, to overlaps between monetary poverty and multidimensional deprivation. This technical note describes the EU-MODA methodology in detail.

Children living in urban slums in Dhaka, Bangladesh, often have poor access to school and attend different types of school than students from middle class households. This paper asks whether their experiences in school also disadvantage them further in terms of their learning outcomes and the likelihood of dropping out. It is based on interviews with 36 students aged 11-16 from both slum and middle-class backgrounds, in 2012. Most of the participants were in private schools, and learning was overwhelmingly geared towards assessment and the memorisation of set content. Though teachers were sometimes hard-working in preparing their students for examinations, ultimate responsibility fell to the students. Ranking and labelling of students kept their examination performance salient at all times. Teacher-student relationships varied from the supportive to the abusive. Beating and humiliating punishment were common in all types of school, despite a recent legal ban on the former. Lessons were sometimes dry, irrelevant to students’ lives, and with little scope for active student engagement. A new emphasis on ‘creative learning’ in curricula and teacher training had, at the time of the study, yet to filter into the classroom. Students were subject to the risk of violence both outside and inside the school, whatever their background. However, it was much easier for middle class students to change school when they ran into problems, or to employ private tutors if they needed more help with their lessons. Their way of talking about school reflected a strong sense of inevitability that they would at least complete secondary education, whereas students from slums were limited to one or two local options and even there, their places in the classroom were precarious. The paper discusses how these experiences in school are likely to heighten the risk of dropping out for slum students, analyses the results in terms of de-facto privatization and school accountability, and recommends better regulation of private tuition, and teaching styles that are less obsessed with examination results.

The impacts of the recent food, fuel and financial (3F) crises on children’s rights and well-being are being widely documented. However, from a child rights and well-being perspective little regard has so far been given to a particular socio-economic trend that has been indirectly intensified by this three-fold crisis: the proliferation of what are collectively known as ‘commercial pressures on land’ (CPLs). CPLs essentially refer to large-scale investments in land taking part in large parts of the ‘Global South’, led by multiple structural drivers, and undertaken by a variety of public, private and hybrid actors, both domestic and foreign, operating in diverse sectors. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive review of the existing literature on the political economy of CPLs with the specific intention of mapping the relevant channels of impact on the rights and well-being of children living in rural areas where CPLs are fast-proliferating. Although there are some documented benefits, according to the large majority of the literature reviewed, the twin outcomes of displacement and dispossession are found to be critical negative socio-economic changes resulting from CPLs. In conjunction with a pervasive lack of transparency in the land transfer negotiation and implementation processes, the twin outcomes are in turn associated with a number of transmission channels that can impact the rights and well-being of children in affected rural communities, which mainly consist of: loss of access to land and other essential natural resources such as water; increased risk of insecurity of tenure; loss of livelihoods and sources of income; forced evictions; increased exposure to social conflicts and intra-household tensions; and lack of voice. The review also highlights the importance of bridging and rationalising current data on the scale and impact of CPLs on affected communities, which at the moment tends to be polarised between aggregate level data and those collected at localized levels primarily through small-scale case studies. In the absence of extensive child-centred analyses of the impacts of current manifestations of CPLs, the paper calls for further empirical studies which identify and assess, through a child rights and well-being perspective, the particular ‘structure-agency’ conditions under which reported benefits and negative impacts of CPLs take place, in order to address policy response gaps.

Social protection is particularly important for children, in view of their higher levels of vulnerability compared to adults, and the role that social protection can play in ensuring adequate nutrition, access to and utilization of social services. While existing evidence shows that social protection programmes successfully address several dimensions of child well-being – often in an indirect way – a move towards a more “child sensitive” approach to social protection has recently been advocated at the highest level in the international development community. Until now, however, the efforts that have been made to analyse the evidence regarding how social protection affects children have been based on wider analyses of the overall impact of social protection on different groups of recipients, or on analyses based on specific outcomes. This paper explores this issue in more detail. Based on an extensive analysis of the existing evidence on the impact of social protection programmes in the developing world, the paper aims to assess what are the channels that have to be taken into account to understand how the benefits of social protection could be maximized with specific regard to the different dimensions of children’s well-being.

Together with the Innocenti Working paper on relative income poverty of children in rich countries (Bradshaw et al, 2012), this paper on multidimensional child poverty and child deprivation forms the background studies on which the Innocenti Report Card 10 is based (Measuring Child Poverty: New league tables of child poverty in the world‟s rich countries). The paper focuses on child deprivation in Europe and studies the degree to which it is experienced by children in 29 countries using a child specific deprivation scale. The paper discusses the construction of a child deprivation scale and estimates a European Child Deprivation Index for the 29 countries using 14 specific child related variables made available by the child module of the EU-SILC 2009 survey. The 29 countries are ranked according to the degree of child deprivation: the results show considerable differences between the countries. The (non-)overlap between child deprivation and child monetary poverty is considerable but limited. In general the results indicate where policy interventions can produce improvements.