Cash, food, or vouchers? Evidence from a randomized experiment in northern Ecuador
By Melissa Hidrobo, John Hoddinott, Amber Peterman, Amy Margolies, Vanessa Moreira. 2014
343 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The debate over whether to provide food assistance and the form that this assistance should take has a long history in economics. Despite the ongoing debate, little rigorous evidence exists that compares food assistance in the form of cash versus in-kind. This paper uses a randomized evaluation to assess the impacts and cost-effectiveness of cash, food vouchers, and food transfers. We find that all three modalities significantly improve the quantity and quality of food consumed. However, differences emerge in the types of food consumed, with food transfers leading to significantly larger increases in calories consumed, and vouchers leading to significantly larger increases in dietary diversity.
Subfields: Nutrition and Dietetics, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/97df1cc847643ca3b04e08c5f081b8a7097534ca
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In Safety Research
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- 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).”
- The Effect of Cash, Vouchers, and Food Transfers on Intimate Partner Violence: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Northern Ecuador (2016, unknown): “For poverty related stress, we do not test directly decreases in stress but a companion paper shows that the transfers decreased poverty as measured by the value of consumption, and increased food security ( Hidrobo et al. 2014 .”
- The Impact of Cash and Food Transfers: Evidence from a Randomized Intervention in Niger (2018, unknown): “Consistent with figure 1, Hidrobo et al. (2014) report that relative to food, cash transfers have a higher impact on measures of diet quality (such as expenditures on vegetables and animal source foods) and a lower impact on caloric acquistion.”
- Tapping the economic and nutritional power of vegetables (2017, background): “A study of food choices associated with provision of food, cash or vouchers to low-income populations in Ecuador found that vouchers were the most effective in encouraging vegetable consumption (Hidrobo et al., 2014).”