Cash Transfers and Temptation Goods: A Review of Global Evidence
By David K. Evans, Anna Popova. 2014
116 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Cash transfers have been demonstrated to improve education and health outcomes and alleviate poverty in various contexts. However, policy makers and others often express concern that poor households will use transfers to buy alcohol, tobacco, or other"temptation goods."The income effect of transfers will increase expenditures if alcohol and tobacco are normal goods, but this may be offset by other effects, including the substitution effect, the effect of social messaging about the appropriate use of transfers, and the effect of shifting dynamics in intra-household bargaining. The net effect is ambiguous. This paper reviews 19 studies with quantitative evidence on the impact of cash transfers on temptation goods, as well as 11 studies that surveyed the number of respondents who reported they used transfers for temptation goods. Almost without exception, studies find either no significant impact or a significant negative impact of transfers on temptation goods. In the only (two, non-experimental) studies with positive significant impacts, the magnitude is small. This result is supported by data from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. A growing number of studies from a range of contexts therefore indicate that concerns about the use of cash transfers for alcohol and tobacco consumption are unfounded.
Subfields: Accounting
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/00825ab90a6b71f5b8aee5106b72f662bf96abba
Citations in the corpus
- Theories of Poverty Traps and Anti-Poverty Policies (2015, unknown): “…or present consumption), insuffi cient intergenerational altruism, or gender bias • Even though there isn’t that much evidence that the poor fritter the money away (Evans and Popova, 2014), there is fairly compelling evidence that CCTs are more effective than UCTs in raising educational outcomes.”
- Cash transfers and labor supply: Evidence from a large-scale program in Iran (2018, unknown): “…on school enrollment, and impact evaluations are therefore more concerned with whether they reach their stated objectives than if they reduce labor supply (see, for example, Case 2004, Bosch and Manacorda 2012, and Schultz 2004, Evans and Popova 2014, Department for International Development 2011).”
- Realizing the Full Potential of Social Safety Nets in Africa (2018, unknown): “Th e meta-analysis found nine studies that reported on health care expenditures, but the mean impact on monthly spending was not signifi cant (CPC 2016; Evans et al. 2014; Haushofer and Shapiro 2016; Merttens et al. 2013; Pellerano et al. 2014; Premand and del Ninno 2016; Rosas and Sabarwal 2016; Se”