Publication:
Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation of the Household Welfare Impacts of Conditional and Unconditional Cash Transfers Given to Mothers or Fathers

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Files in English
English PDF (801.36 KB)
1,721 downloads
English Text (152.72 KB)
70 downloads
Date
2016-06
ISSN
Published
2016-06
Author(s)
Akresh, Richard
Kazianga, Harounan
Editor(s)
Abstract
This study conducted a randomized control trial in rural Burkina Faso to estimate the impact of alternative cash transfer delivery mechanisms on education, health, and household welfare outcomes. The two-year pilot program randomly distributed cash transfers that were either conditional or unconditional and were given to either mothers or fathers. Conditionality was linked to older children enrolling in school and attending regularly and younger children receiving preventive health check-ups. Compared with the control group, cash transfers improve children's education and health and household socioeconomic conditions. For school enrollment and most child health outcomes, conditional cash transfers outperform unconditional cash transfers. Giving cash to mothers does not lead to significantly better child health or education outcomes, and there is evidence that money given to fathers improves young children's health, particularly during years of poor rainfall. Cash transfers to fathers also yield relatively more household investment in livestock, cash crops, and improved housing.
Link to Data Set
Citation
Akresh, Richard; de Walque, Damien; Kazianga, Harounan. 2016. Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation of the Household Welfare Impacts of Conditional and Unconditional Cash Transfers Given to Mothers or Fathers. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 7730. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/24647 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.
Associated URLs
Associated content
Report Series
Report Series
Other publications in this report series
  • Publication
    Geopolitics and the World Trading System
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-12-23) Mattoo, Aaditya; Ruta, Michele; Staiger, Robert W.
    Until the beginning of this century, the GATT/WTO system worked. Economic research provided a compelling explanation. It showed that if governments maximize the well-being of their own countries broadly defined, GATT/WTO principles would facilitate mutually beneficial cooperation over their trade policy choices. Now heightened geopolitical rivalry seems to have undermined the WTO. A simple transposition of the previous rationalization suggests that geopolitics and trade cooperation are not compatible. The paper shows that this is only true if rivalry eclipses any consideration of own-country well-being. In all other circumstances, there are gains from trade cooperation even with geopolitics. Furthermore, the WTO’s relevance is in question only if it adheres too rigidly to its existing rules and norms. Through measured adaptation to the geopolitical imperative, the WTO can continue to thrive as a forum for multilateral trade cooperation in the age of geopolitics.
  • Publication
    The Macroeconomic Implications of Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Options
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29) Abalo, Kodzovi; Boehlert, Brent; Bui, Thanh; Burns, Andrew; Castillo, Diego; Chewpreecha, Unnada; Haider, Alexander; Hallegatte, Stephane; Jooste, Charl; McIsaac, Florent; Ruberl, Heather; Smet, Kim; Strzepek, Ken
    Estimating the macroeconomic implications of climate change impacts and adaptation options is a topic of intense research. This paper presents a framework in the World Bank's macrostructural model to assess climate-related damages. This approach has been used in many Country Climate and Development Reports, a World Bank diagnostic that identifies priorities to ensure continued development in spite of climate change and climate policy objectives. The methodology captures a set of impact channels through which climate change affects the economy by (1) connecting a set of biophysical models to the macroeconomic model and (2) exploring a set of development and climate scenarios. The paper summarizes the results for five countries, highlighting the sources and magnitudes of their vulnerability --- with estimated gross domestic product losses in 2050 exceeding 10 percent of gross domestic product in some countries and scenarios, although only a small set of impact channels is included. The paper also presents estimates of the macroeconomic gains from sector-level adaptation interventions, considering their upfront costs and avoided climate impacts and finding significant net gross domestic product gains from adaptation opportunities identified in the Country Climate and Development Reports. Finally, the paper discusses the limits of current modeling approaches, and their complementarity with empirical approaches based on historical data series. The integrated modeling approach proposed in this paper can inform policymakers as they make proactive decisions on climate change adaptation and resilience.
  • Publication
    Global Poverty Revisited Using 2021 PPPs and New Data on Consumption
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-06-05) Foster, Elizabeth; Jolliffe, Dean Mitchell; Ibarra, Gabriel Lara; Lakner, Christoph; Tettah-Baah, Samuel
    Recent improvements in survey methodologies have increased measured consumption in many low- and lower-middle-income countries that now collect a more comprehensive measure of household consumption. Faced with such methodological changes, countries have frequently revised upward their national poverty lines to make them appropriate for the new measures of consumption. This in turn affects the World Bank’s global poverty lines when they are periodically revised. The international poverty line, which is based on the typical poverty line in low-income countries, increases by around 40 percent to $3.00 when the more recent national poverty lines as well as the 2021 purchasing power parities are incorporated. The net impact of the changes in international prices, the poverty line, and new survey data (including new data for India) is an increase in global extreme poverty by some 125 million people in 2022, and a significant shift of poverty away from South Asia and toward Sub-Saharan Africa. The changes at higher poverty lines, which are more relevant to middle-income countries, are mixed.
  • Publication
    From Patriarchy to Policy
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29) Bussolo, Maurizio; Rexer, Jonah M.; Hu, Lynn
    Legal institutions play an important role in shaping gender equality in economic domains, from inheritance to labor markets. But where do gender equal laws come from? Using cross-country data on social norms and legal equality, this paper investigates the socio-cultural roots of gender inequity in the legal system and its implications for female labor force participation. To identify the impact of social norms, the analysis uses an empirical strategy that exploits pre-modern differences in ancestral patriarchal culture as an instrument for present-day gender norms. The findings show that ancestral patriarchal culture is a strong predictor of contemporary norms, and conservative social norms are associated with more gender inequality in the de jure legal framework, the de facto implementation of laws, and the labor market. The paper presents evidence for a political selection mechanism linking norms to laws: countries with more conservative norms elect political leaders who are more hostile to gender equality, who then pass less progressive legislation. The results highlight the cultural roots and political drivers of legalized gender inequality.
  • Publication
    Global Socio-economic Resilience to Natural Disasters
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-22) Middelanis, Robin; Jafino, Bramka Arga; Hill, Ruth; Nguyen, Minh Cong; Hallegatte, Stephane
    Most disaster risk assessments use damages to physical assets as their central metric, often neglecting distributional impacts and the coping and recovery capacity of affected people. To address this shortcoming, the concepts of well-being losses and socio-economic resilience—the ability to experience asset losses without a decline in well-being—have been proposed. This paper uses microsimulations to produce a global estimate of well-being losses from, and socio-economic resilience to, natural disasters, covering 132 countries. On average, each $1 in disaster-related asset losses results in well-being losses equivalent to a $2 uniform national drop in consumption, with significant variation within and across countries. The poorest income quintile within each country incurs only 9% of national asset losses but accounts for 33% of well-being losses. Compared to high-income countries, low-income countries experience 67% greater well-being losses per dollar of asset losses and require 56% more time to recover. Socio-economic resilience is uncorrelated with exposure or vulnerability to natural hazards. However, a 10 percent increase in GDP per capita is associated with a 0.9 percentage point gain in resilience, but this benefit arises indirectly—such as through higher rate of formal employment, better financial inclusion, and broader social protection coverage—rather than from higher income itself. This paper assess ten policy options and finds that socio-economic and financial interventions (such as insurance and social protection) can effectively complement asset-focused measures (e.g., construction standards) and that interventions targeting low-income populations usually have higher returns in terms of avoided well-being losses per dollar invested.
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue

Related items

Showing items related by metadata.

  • Publication
    Cash Transfers and Child Schooling : Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation of the Role of Conditionality
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-01) Akresh, Richard; de Walque, Damien; Kazianga, Harounan
    The authors conduct a randomized experiment in rural Burkina Faso to estimate the impact of alternative cash transfer delivery mechanisms on education. The two-year pilot program randomly distributed cash transfers that were either conditional or unconditional. Families under the conditional schemes were required to have their children ages 7-15 enrolled in school and attending classes regularly. There were no such requirements under the unconditional programs. The results indicate that unconditional and conditional cash transfer programs have a similar impact increasing the enrollment of children who are traditionally favored by parents for school participation, including boys, older children, and higher ability children. However, the conditional transfers are significantly more effective than the unconditional transfers in improving the enrollment of "marginal children" who are initially less likely to go to school, such as girls, younger children, and lower ability children. Thus, conditionality plays a critical role in benefiting children who are less likely to receive investments from their parents.
  • Publication
    Rethinking School Feeding Social Safety Nets, Child Development, and the Education Sector
    (World Bank, 2009) Burbano, Carmen; Bundy, Donald; Gelli, Aulo; Grosh, Margaret; Jukes, Matthew; Drake, Lesley
    This review highlights three main findings. First, school feeding programs in low-income countries exhibit large variation in cost, with concomitant opportunities for cost containment. Second, as countries get richer, school feeding costs become a much smaller proportion of the investment in education. For example, in Zambia the cost of school feeding is about 50 percent of annual per capita costs for primary education; in Ireland it is only 10 percent. Further analysis is required to define these relationships, but supporting countries to maintain an investment in school feeding through this transition may emerge as a key role for development partners. Third, the main preconditions for the transition to sustainable national programs are mainstreaming school feeding in national policies and plans, especially education sector plans; identifying national sources of financing; and expanding national implementation capacity. Mainstreaming a development policy for school feeding into national education sector plans offers the added advantage of aligning support for school feeding with the processes already established to harmonize development partner support for the education for all-fast track initiative.
  • Publication
    Child Labor, Schooling, and Child Ability
    (2012-02-01) Akresh, Richard; Bagby, Emilie; de Walque, Damien; Kazianga, Harounan
    Using data collected in rural Burkina Faso, this paper examines how children's cognitive abilities influence households' decisions to invest in their education. To address the endogeneity of child ability measures, the analysis uses rainfall shocks experienced in utero or early childhood to instrument for ability. Negative shocks in utero lead to 0.24 standard deviations lower ability z-scores, corresponding with a 38 percent enrollment drop and a 49 percent increase in child labor hours compared with their siblings. Negative education impacts are largest for in utero shocks, diminished for shocks before age two, and have no impact for shocks after age two. The paper links the fetal origins hypothesis and sibling rivalry literatures by showing that shocks experienced in utero not only have direct negative impacts on the child's cognitive ability (fetal origins hypothesis), but also negatively impact the child through the effects on sibling rivalry resulting from the cognitive differences.
  • Publication
    Where Have All the Poor Gone? : Cambodia Poverty Assessment 2013
    (Washington, DC, 2013-11) World Bank
    Over the seven years from 2004 through 2011, Cambodian economic growth was tremendous, ranking amid the best in the world. Moreover, household consumption increased by nearly 40 percent. And this growth was pro-poor, not only reducing inequality, but also proportionally boosting poor people's consumption further and faster than that of the non-poor. As a result, the poverty rate dropped from 52.2 to 20.5 percent, surpassing all expectations. However, the majority of these people escaped poverty only slightly: they remain highly vulnerable, even to small shocks, which could quickly bring them back into poverty. The main drivers of poverty reduction were better prices of rice for farmers, better wages for agricultural workers, increases in salary jobs for the urban labor force, and better income for non-agricultural businesses for rural households. Improvements in health and education, as well as government investment in infrastructure, provided a favorable environment for the poor, allowing many of them to pull themselves out of poverty. Looking forward, some of these drivers of poverty reduction are likely to stall. Coupled with increased vulnerability, the present conditions create new challenges for the Royal Government of Cambodia. Furthermore, most of the improvements in Cambodia originated at very low values, thus leaving much work to better the well-being of many Cambodian households. Outstanding gains have been achieved, but it will take focus and further actions to maintain Cambodia's future growth. Most poverty in Cambodia is found in the countryside: about 90 percent of Cambodia's poor live in rural areas. To generate the maximum impact, government policies should concentrate on the productivity of the rural poor's major assets: their labor and their land.
  • Publication
    Can Conditional Cash Transfers Improve Education and Nutrition Outcomes for Poor Children in Bangladesh? Evidence from a Pilot Project
    (World Bank Group, Washington, DC, 2014-10) Ferre, Celine; Sharif, Iffath
    There is an increasing recognition that investment in human development at an earlier age can have a significant impact on the lifetime earnings capacity of an individual. This notion is the basis for the popularity of conditional cash transfer programs to help boost child health and education outcomes. The evidence on the impact of conditional cash transfers on health and education outcomes, however, is mixed. This paper uses panel data from a pilot project and evaluates the impact of conditional cash transfers on consumption, education, and nutrition outcomes among poor rural families in Bangladesh. Given implementation challenges the intervention was not able to improve school attendance. However the analysis shows that the pilot had a significant impact on the incidence of wasting among children who were 10-22 months old when the program started, reducing the share of children with weight-for-height below two standard deviations from the World Health Organization benchmark by 40 percent. The pilot was also able to improve nutrition knowledge: there was a significant increase in the proportion of beneficiary mothers who knew about the importance of exclusively breastfeeding infants until the age of six months. The results also suggest a significant positive impact on food consumption, especially consumption of food with high protein content.

Users also downloaded

Showing related downloaded files

  • Publication
    Government Matters III : Governance Indicators for 1996-2002
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-08) Kaufmann, Daniel; Kraay, Aart; Mastruzzi, Massimo
    The authors present estimates of six dimensions of governance covering 199 countries and territories for four time periods: 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002. These indicators are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance, drawn from 25 separate data sources constructed by 18 different organizations. The authors assign these individual measures of governance to categories capturing key dimensions of governance and use an unobserved components model to construct six aggregate governance indicators in each of the four periods. They present the point estimates of the dimensions of governance as well as the margins of errors for each country for the four periods. The governance indicators reported here are an update and expansion of previous research work on indicators initiated in 1998 (Kaufmann, Kraay, and Zoido-Lobat 1999a,b and 2002). The authors also address various methodological issues, including the interpretation and use of the data given the estimated margins of errors.
  • Publication
    Governance Matters IV : Governance Indicators for 1996-2004
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2005-06) Kaufmann, Daniel; Kraay, Aart; Mastruzzi, Massimo
    The authors present the latest update of their aggregate governance indicators, together with new analysis of several issues related to the use of these measures. The governance indicators measure the following six dimensions of governance: (1) voice and accountability; (2) political instability and violence; (3) government effectiveness; (4) regulatory quality; (5) rule of law, and (6) control of corruption. They cover 209 countries and territories for 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2004. They are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance, drawn from 37 separate data sources constructed by 31 organizations. The authors present estimates of the six dimensions of governance for each period, as well as margins of error capturing the range of likely values for each country. These margins of error are not unique to perceptions-based measures of governance, but are an important feature of all efforts to measure governance, including objective indicators. In fact, the authors give examples of how individual objective measures provide an incomplete picture of even the quite particular dimensions of governance that they are intended to measure. The authors also analyze in detail changes over time in their estimates of governance; provide a framework for assessing the statistical significance of changes in governance; and suggest a simple rule of thumb for identifying statistically significant changes in country governance over time. The ability to identify significant changes in governance over time is much higher for aggregate indicators than for any individual indicator. While the authors find that the quality of governance in a number of countries has changed significantly (in both directions), they also provide evidence suggesting that there are no trends, for better or worse, in global averages of governance. Finally, they interpret the strong observed correlation between income and governance, and argue against recent efforts to apply a discount to governance performance in low-income countries.
  • Publication
    Measuring Financial Inclusion : The Global Findex Database
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-04) Demirguc-Kunt, Asli; Klapper, Leora
    This paper provides the first analysis of the Global Financial Inclusion (Global Findex) Database, a new set of indicators that measure how adults in 148 economies save, borrow, make payments, and manage risk. The data show that 50 percent of adults worldwide have an account at a formal financial institution, though account penetration varies widely across regions, income groups and individual characteristics. In addition, 22 percent of adults report having saved at a formal financial institution in the past 12 months, and 9 percent report having taken out a new loan from a bank, credit union or microfinance institution in the past year. Although half of adults around the world remain unbanked, at least 35 percent of them report barriers to account use that might be addressed by public policy. Among the most commonly reported barriers are high cost, physical distance, and lack of proper documentation, though there are significant differences across regions and individual characteristics.
  • Publication
    Design Thinking for Social Innovation
    (2010-07) Brown, Tim; Wyatt, Jocelyn
    Designers have traditionally focused on enchancing the look and functionality of products.
  • Publication
    Governance Matters VIII : Aggregate and Individual Governance Indicators 1996–2008
    (2009-06-01) Kaufmann, Daniel; Kraay, Aart; Mastruzzi, Massimo
    This paper reports on the 2009 update of the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) research project, covering 212 countries and territories and measuring six dimensions of governance between 1996 and 2008: Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption. These aggregate indicators are based on hundreds of specific and disaggregated individual variables measuring various dimensions of governance, taken from 35 data sources provided by 33 different organizations. The data reflect the views on governance of public sector, private sector and NGO experts, as well as thousands of citizen and firm survey respondents worldwide. The authors also explicitly report the margins of error accompanying each country estimate. These reflect the inherent difficulties in measuring governance using any kind of data. They find that even after taking margins of error into account, the WGI permit meaningful cross-country comparisons as well as monitoring progress over time. The aggregate indicators, together with the disaggregated underlying indicators, are available at www.govindicators.org.