Profiles

The broad-ranging benefits of cash transfers are now widely recognized. However, the evidence base highlights that they often fall short in achieving longer-term and second-order impacts related to nutrition, learning outcomes and morbidity. In recognition of these limitations, several ‘cash plus’ initiatives have been introduced, whereby cash transfers are combined with one or more types of complementary support. This paper aims to identify key factors for successful implementation of these increasingly popular ‘cash plus’ programmes, based on (i) a review of the emerging evidence base of ‘cash plus’ interventions and (ii) an examination of three case studies, namely, Chile Solidario in Chile, IN-SCT in Ethiopia and LEAP in Ghana. The analysis was guided by a conceptual framework proposing a menu of ‘cash plus’ components. The assessment of three case studies indicated that effective implementation of ‘cash plus’ components has indeed contributed to greater impacts of the respective programmes. Such initiatives have thereby addressed some of the non-financial and structural barriers that poor people face and have reinforced the positive effects of cash transfer programmes. In design of such programmes, further attention should be paid to the constraints faced by the most vulnerable and how such constraints can be overcome. We conclude with recommendations regarding the provision of complementary support and cross-sectoral linkages based on lessons learned from the case studies. More research is still needed on the impact of the many variations of ‘cash plus’ programming, including evidence on the comparative roles of individual ‘plus’ components, as well as the knowledge, attitudes and behaviour pathways which influence these impacts.

This paper describes the evolution of child poverty in 41 OECD and/or European Union countries during the Great Recession. In 2012 there were around 76.5 million children living in poverty in the 41 OECD countries studied here. A League Table of the 50 US states, home to over a third of all children in the OECD shows that child poverty has increased in 34 out of 51 states.

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.

The goal of this paper is to monitor the impact of the Great Recession on child well-being in countries of the European Union. Data from the EU-28 plus Iceland, Norway, Switzerland and Turkey is used to document the change in children’s well-being from 2007/8-2012/3. The authors 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.

During the late 2000s, European countries were affected by an economic crisis considered the most severe since the Second World War. However, not all the countries were hit in the same way. Some governments preferred to increase taxes while others preferred to reduce public expenditure, also cutting benefits and services for children and their families.

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.

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. A large-scale survey in Kenya shows that 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.

As in other developed countries, the recent economic crisis affected the Australian economy. Nonetheless, while the OECD countries recorded a drop of GDP near to 4 per cent in 2009, in Australia GDP grew by 1.4 per cent. An important contribution to this performance came from the fiscal stimulus implemented by the government.

This paper compares the well-being of children across the most economically advanced countries of the world. It discusses the methodological issues involved in comparing children’s well-being across countries and explains how a Child Well-being Index is constructed to rank countries according to their performance in advancing child well-being. This paper is one of the three background papers written as the basis for Report Card 11 (2013), ‘Child Well-being in Rich Countries: A Comparative Overview’.

The aim of this paper is to assess the inter-temporal change in child well-being over the last decade. For this purpose, it compares the child well-being index calculated in the Innocenti Report Cards 7 and 11. Although the two Report Cards use the same methodological framework, they differ in the set of indicators used. It is therefore necessary to compute a modified child well-being index based on the common indicators used in the two Report Cards for the countries under study.

This paper is based on background research undertaken for the UNICEF Innocenti Report Card 11 on child well-being in rich countries. It develops a new domain index of subjective well-being based on several indicators drawn from the Health Behaviour of School Aged Children (HBSC) survey 2009/10, which includes life satisfaction, relationships with family and friends, well-being at school, and subjective health.

Based on an extensive analysis of the existing evidence on the impact of social protection programmes in the developing world, this 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 (economics and livelihood, education, health, nutrition).

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. (REVISED VERSION)

This paper presents and discusses child relative income poverty statistics for 35 economically advanced countries, representing all the members of the European Union, Australia, Canada, Iceland, Japan, New Zealand, Switzerland and the United States. According to the data (mostly from 2008), Nordic countries and the Netherlands present the lowest child relative poverty levels, while Japan, the United States, most of the Southern European countries and some of the new EU member states have among the highest.

The Chile Solidario programme is an avant garde conditional cash transfer (CCT) in the Latin American context, introducing innovative features aimed at addressing specifically the multidimensional nature of poverty. At the household level we find that the programme has a significant impact on lifting families out of extreme poverty and that it does not have disincentive effects on labour market participation.