Social Protection, Food Security, and Asset Formation
By Melissa Hidrobo, John Hoddinott, Neha Kumar, M. Olivier. 2018
168 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Summary The last two decades have seen a rapid rise in social protection programs and studies that assess their impacts on a large number of domains. We construct a new database of studies of these programs that report impacts on food security outcomes and asset formation. Our meta-analysis finds that social protection programs improve both the quantity and quality of food consumed by beneficiaries. The magnitudes of these effect sizes are meaningful. The average social protection program increases the value of food consumed/expenditure by 13% and caloric acquisition by 8%. Food expenditure rises faster than caloric acquisition because households use transfers to improve the quality of their diet, most notably increasing their consumption of calories from animal source foods. Since the consumption of animal source foods in these populations is low, and because there are significant nutritional benefits to increasing the consumption of these, this is a positive outcome. Our meta-analysis also finds that social protection programs lead to increased asset holdings as measured by livestock, non-farm productive assets, farm productive assets, and savings. There is no impact on land holdings though the number of studies that assess these is small.
Subfields: Gender Studies, General Health Professions, Safety Research
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/61ec6603ce4dab769bb2c11a898feeba05ba82ff
How researchers see this paper
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In Gender Studies
In Safety Research
- B. Minten
- David Stifel
- Melissa Hidrobo
- Amber Peterman
- John Hoddinott
- Christopher B. Barrett
- Michael R. Carter
- Stefan Dercon
Citations in the corpus
- Children’s Diets, Nutrition Knowledge, and Access to Markets (2017, background): “While at the household level, raising incomes improves household food security (Hidrobo et al. 2015), there is now considerable evidence that the link between income and children’s nutritional status is weak or non-existent (Manley, Gitter, and Slavchevska 2013).”
- A Mixed-Method Review of Cash Transfers and Intimate Partner Violence in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (2018, background): “…expenditure and consumption, household durable and productive assets, income-generation and labor-force participation, and savings and investments (Hidrobo et al. 2014; Bastagli et al. 2016; Natali et al. 2016; Banerjee et al. 2017; Handa et al. 2017; Handa et al. 2018; Hidrobo et al. 2018).”