Cash Transfers and Child Nutrition: What we know and what we need to know

Cash Transfers and Child Nutrition: What we know and what we need to know

AUTHOR(S)
Richard de Groot; Tia Palermo; Sudhanshu Handa; Amber Peterman; Luigi Peter Ragno

Published: 2015 Innocenti Working Papers
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. It finds that several key gaps should be addressed in future including 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.
Unconditional Government Social Cash Transfer in Africa Does not Increase Fertility

Unconditional Government Social Cash Transfer in Africa Does not Increase Fertility

AUTHOR(S)
Tia Palermo; Sudhanshu Handa; Amber Peterman; Leah Prencipe; David Seidenfeld

Published: 2015 Innocenti Working Papers
In Africa, one of the key barriers to the scale-up of unconditional cash transfer programmes is the notion held by politicians, and even the general public, that such programmes will induce the poor to have more children. The hard evidence on this question is scanty. The current study uses evaluation data from the Zambian Child Grant Programme (CGP), a large-scale UCT targeted to households with a child under the age of five at programme initiation and evaluates the impact of transfers on fertility and child-fostering decisions. The overall goal of the CGP is to reduce extreme poverty and break the intergenerational transmission of poverty. The results contribute to the small literature that rigorously documents the fertility impacts of unconditional cash transfer programmes in developing countries.
Cite this publication | No. of pages: 40 | Thematic area: Social Policies | Tags: cash transfers, economic policy, fertility
CC-MODA - Cross Country Multiple Overlapping Deprivation Analysis: Analysing Child Poverty and Deprivation in sub-Saharan Africa

CC-MODA - Cross Country Multiple Overlapping Deprivation Analysis: Analysing Child Poverty and Deprivation in sub-Saharan Africa

AUTHOR(S)
Marlous de Milliano; Ilze Plavgo

Published: 2014 Innocenti Working Papers
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 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.
Pauvreté et privation des enfants au Mali : les premières estimations nationales

Pauvreté et privation des enfants au Mali : les premières estimations nationales

AUTHOR(S)
Marlous de Milliano; Sudhanshu Handa

Published: 2014 Innocenti Working Papers
Le chevauchement entre la pauvreté et les privations touche au total 29 % des enfants, ce qui signifie que les enfants victimes de privations ne vivent pas tous dans des ménages pauvres, c’est-à-dire aux revenus inférieurs au seuil national de pauvreté. C’est dans les zones rurales que la privation et la pauvreté monétaire sont le plus étroitement liées, et ce, pour tous les groupes d’âge. Une augmentation du revenu de 1 dollar par personne et par jour permettrait de réduire de 25 points la probabilité de privations dans les zones rurales.
Household Welfare Measurement in Bangladesh: A tale of two short consumption modules

Household Welfare Measurement in Bangladesh: A tale of two short consumption modules

AUTHOR(S)
Luisa Natali; Chris De Neubourg

Published: 2014 Innocenti Working Papers
Two short consumption modules were piloted in Bogra and Sirajganj (Bangladesh) in May-June 2012 as part of the Global MICS5 Pilot. This paper aims at validating this exercise and assessing the accuracy and reliability of the consumption estimates obtained. The use of a benchmark consumption module is essential in order to assess how well the two short options fare; the analysis therefore consists of a systematic comparison of both short modules with a benchmark. The attempt made is to isolate and test the impact of the length (degree of commodity) of the consumption questionnaire on the quality of consumption and poverty estimates as well as distributional measures obtained. We conclude that it is feasible to include a short consumption module in MICS (Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys).
Child Poverty and Deprivation in Mali: The first national estimates

Child Poverty and Deprivation in Mali: The first national estimates

AUTHOR(S)
Marlous de Milliano; Sudhanshu Handa

Published: 2014 Innocenti Working Papers
In Mali the national child deprivation rate is 50%, slightly higher than the national (monetary) child poverty rate of 46%. 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.
Understanding Child Deprivation in the European Union: The Multiple Overlapping Deprivation Analysis (EU-Moda) Approach

Understanding Child Deprivation in the European Union: The Multiple Overlapping Deprivation Analysis (EU-Moda) Approach

AUTHOR(S)
Yekaterina Chzhen; Chris De Neubourg; Ilze Plavgo; Marlous de Milliano

Published: 2014 Innocenti Working Papers
Poverty has serious consequences for children’s well-being as well as for their achievements in adult life. The Multiple Overlapping Deprivation Analysis for the European Union (EU-MODA) compares the living conditions of children across the EU member states, plus Iceland and Norway. Rooted in the established multidimensional poverty measurement tradition, EU-MODA uses the international framework of child rights to inform the construction of indicators and dimensions essential to children’s material well-being, taking into account the needs of children at various stages of their life cycle. The study contributes to the literature on monetary child poverty and material deprivation in the EU by analysing several dimensions of child deprivation individually and simultaneously, constructing multidimensional deprivation indices, and studying the overlaps between monetary poverty and multidimensional deprivation.
Significant Changes to Family-related Benefits in Rich Countries during the Great Recession

Significant Changes to Family-related Benefits in Rich Countries during the Great Recession

AUTHOR(S)
Saara Hämäläinen; Yekaterina Chzhen; Jorge Vargas

Published: 2014 Innocenti Working Papers
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.
Pre-crisis Conditions and Government Policy Responses: Chile and Mexico during the Great Recession

Pre-crisis Conditions and Government Policy Responses: Chile and Mexico during the Great Recession

AUTHOR(S)
Bruno Martorano

Published: 2014 Innocenti Working Papers
Chile and Mexico reacted to the crisis by implementing several policy responses, they achieved different outcomes. In particular, the Chilean economy recovered faster than the Mexican one. However, the main differences are related to social outcomes. On one hand, the Gini coefficient decreased in both countries. On the other hand, both overall and child poverty dropped in Chile while they rose sharply in Mexico. , Chile introduced a stimulus package twice as large the Mexican one. When the financial crisis arrived in late 2008 - Chile and Mexico started from different positions, they generated a different public effort, which in turn led to different economic and social results.
Child Poverty and the Great Recession in the United States

Child Poverty and the Great Recession in the United States

AUTHOR(S)
Marianne Bitler; Hilary Hoynes; Elira Kuka

Published: 2014 Innocenti Working Papers
In the midst of the Great Recession, median real household income fell from $61,597 in 2007 to $57,025 in 2010 and $51,007 in 2012. Given that the effects of the Great Recession on unemployment were greater for less skilled workers the authors expect the effects of the Great Recession on household incomes to be larger in relative terms for individuals in the lower end of the income distribution. To explore this issue, in this paper, they comprehensively examine the effects of the Great Recession on child poverty.
Trends in Child Well-being in EU Countries during the Great Recession: A cross-country comparative perspective

Trends in Child Well-being in EU Countries during the Great Recession: A cross-country comparative perspective

AUTHOR(S)
Luisa Natali; Bruno Martorano; Sudhanshu Handa; Goran Holmqvist; Yekaterina Chzhen

Published: 2014 Innocenti Working Papers
This paper reports on how children have fared during the period of the global economic crisis (Great Recession) in rich European countries. The authors provide a descriptive overview of the evolution in a series of child well-being indicators over time (2007/8-2012/3 ) in 32 countries (the EU-28 plus Iceland, Norway, Switzerland and Turkey). The focus is on key child and adolescent outcome indicators that are expected to have been affected by the crisis and its related real-economy effects in the short and medium-term, including child monetary poverty and material deprivation, subjective well-being, and transition to adulthood (including education and employment). Countries’ performances are compared and ranked according to the change they experienced in these indicators over the period under analysis.
Young People (not) in the Labour Market in Rich Countries during the Great Recession

Young People (not) in the Labour Market in Rich Countries during the Great Recession

AUTHOR(S)
Yekaterina Chzhen; Dominic Richardson

Published: 2014 Innocenti Working Papers
The global financial crisis of 2007/2008 spilled over into the real economy reducing demand for labour and increasing unemployment. Young people were hit hard, with record numbers of 15-24-year-olds out of work and many of them not in education, employment or training (NEET). More than five years since the outbreak of the financial crisis, the economic recovery remains weak and uneven. The study documents a substantial worsening in the youth labour market situation during the Great Recession across the EU and/or OECD, particularly in countries that suffered greater falls in economic output per capita.
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