Let’s begin by shining a hopeful light on crisis recovery! The Partnership for Economic Inclusion released a juicy preview of the State of Economic Inclusion Report. The preview sets out a clear conceptual framework for integrating economic inclusion and social protection (p.7), while data underpinning its “10 key findings” (among others on coverage, adaptations, gender, and disability) is available in a new portal with program-level stats for 200 schemes (including coverage, target groups, design features, and institutional arrangements) and a much-needed costing dashboard!
And now a big question: “is affluence testing the golden cut between ‘universalists’ and ‘poverty-targetists’?”, asks Gassmann in a recent tweet. Her paper, co-authored with Timar, examines such question in the context of Kyrgyzstan by comparing the performance of the much-discussed ‘proxy affluence test’ (p.35), affluence filters (p.37) and other needs based and categorical alternatives. Their technical and political economy analysis concludes that “… attempts at poverty-targeting are likely to exclude the most vulnerable children, (…) purely categorical approaches have not been and are unlikely to be successful (…), but affluence-testing might neutralize discontent with the wealthy receiving benefits” (p.54). (Yet they also note that affluence-testing faces challenges as no household characteristic would uniquely identify the wealthy).
And from one country to 2 global pieces! One of them is curated by Barca and consists in the excellent 2nd edition of the SPACE Covid-19 social protection resources, a handy 18-page document rich of links to papers and guidance materials – including on particular themes (e.g., informal sector workers, disability, gender, migration, etc.), 7 delivery issues, 4 program types, and a set of 9 country “write-ups”. The other great resource is produced by Juergens and Galvani and focuses on pensions (really liked table 1 on p.5 cataloguing adaptations and ‘systems resilience’ measures). Bonus: if you need a brief on targeting, enrollment, transfer selection and whether to go for digital payments… well this IPA brief is for you.
Since I mentioned digitization… Dreze et al heavily contested the results from previous research claiming experimental evidence of a reduction in PDS leakages after ABBA was introduced in Jharkhand state. The authors draw two main lessons, namely a specific one for Jharkhand (“[it was] as a predictable fiasco [that] led to chaos, further ‘pain’ for cardholders, discontent among dealers, complaints from both, and discontinuation of the reform within four months”), and one for RCTs in general (“However ‘rigorous’ the evidence may be, it still needs to be interpreted, summarised, and conveyed. It is quite easy for the evidence to get distorted or embellished in this communication process”).
Bonus on South Asia: Bloch has an IPC one-pager on public spending on health, education and social assistance in the region, while Arruda et al penned an executive summary of non-contributory social programs with children focus. Also, Franciscon and Arruda have another one-pager on Covid-19 and social protection in Sri Lanka.
Does “cash benchmarking” ring a bell? You may recall I shared the Rwanda paper by McIntosh and Zeitlin a few weeks ago, i.e., measuring comparative performance of different interventions relative to unconditional cash. I enjoyed a new round of debates, with a blog by Piper setting the stage and a thought-provoking piece by Starr spicing it up (see calls for cost analysis and long-term outcomes).
More on Africa! An ESID paper by Porisky shows that in Kenya there is less political interference in the local distribution of cash transfers than the literature predicts – that is, strong formal program rules for cash transfers, combined with significant central oversight over program implementation, limits the influence that local politicians have over the distribution of transfer benefits.
Back to Covid-19, first-hand exposure to the pandemic can raise support for social protection! Rees-Jones et al find that people in US counties with 1 standard deviation higher infections are up to 3.9% more likely to support unemployment insurance and healthcare expansion. What about funding modalities? “… [W]e do not find strong evidence that [Covid-19] exposure is associated with support for raising the tax revenue necessary to pay for such activities” (p.10), while more support seems to appear for deficit financing. Bonus: Reischauer reflects on the role social insurance should play in preparing for the next crisis.
Hopping to the other side of the Atlantic, what can change in working hours tell us about the evolution of the Covid-19 crisis in the Netherlands? Von Gaudecker show that after the first “pandemic shock” with strong industry-specific slumps, a general decline in demand set in that impacted the entire economy.
Can the crisis be an opportunity? Cobbinah et al have a nice blog about how Covid-19 could inspire a new way of planning African cities, including based on integrating the informal sector into formal planning processes, fixing several imbalances, and investing in open spaces (see also their full recent paper).
… and on to Latin America with an unusual study: Moser provides an intergenerational, anthropological narrative of social capital and inequalities through the voices of three women and their families from an informal settlement in Guayaquil over 40 years!
More on inequality: an interesting paper by Parolin and Gornick discusses “national growth profiles”, or the marginal contribution of changes in taxes, transfers, and institutions to changes across a country’s income distribution. Based on data from 9 high income countries over 1980s-2010s, they find (sigh!) that welfare regimes explain little of the variations in income inequality.
And finally two great humanitarian resources, namely the 4th episode of CaLP’s CashCast explores how to link social protection and humanitarian cash transfers, a theme that is also the core topic of 25th edition of the GB Cash Sub-Group newsletter.