Relative Effectiveness of Conditional and Unconditional Cash Transfers for Schooling Outcomes in Developing Countries: A Systematic Review

By Sarah Baird. 2013

350 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Increasing educational attainment around the world is one of the key aims of the Millennium Development Goals. Cash transfer programs, both conditional and unconditional, are a popular social protection tool in developing countries that aim, among other things, to improve education outcomes in developing countries. The debate over whether these programs should include conditions has been at the forefront of recent global policy discussions. This systematic review aims to complement the existing evidence on the effectiveness of these programs in improving schooling outcomes and help inform the debate surrounding the design of cash transfer programs. Our main objective was to assess the relative effectiveness of conditional and unconditional cash transfers in improving enrollment, attendance and test scores in developing countries. Our secondary objective was to understand the role of different dimensions of the cash transfer programs, particularly the role of the intensity of conditions and the effects of priming (with respect to the importance of children’s schooling) in cash transfer programs.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Nutrition and Dietetics, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9b0d904b1600dd3e6292ce0708c644cb09344ab0

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Citations in the corpus

Microenterprise growth and the flypaper effect: Evidence from a randomized experiment in Ghana (2014, background): “There is a growing debate over whether aid is more e§ective when simply given as unrestricted cash compared to approaches such as conditional transfers which try to restrict how recipients use any money received (e.g. Baird et al, 2013; Goldstein, 2013; Khazan, 2013).”
When the money runs out: Do cash transfers have sustained effects on human capital accumulation? (2016, neutral): “A rigorous evidence base has shown that cash transfers can have significant effects on household consumption and educational attainment, even if the poor receive these transfers with few strings attached (Baird et al. 2013; Fiszbein, Schady and Ferreira 2009 ; Haushofer and Shapiro 2016; Saavedra an”
Cash Transfers and Temptation Goods (2017, background): “Rather, reviews have focused on outcomes in schooling (Saavedra and García 2013; Baird et al. 2014), health (Leroy, Ruel, and Verhofstadt 2009; Ranganathan and Lagarde 2012), consumption (Fiszbein and Schady 2009), or a combination of these (IEG 2011).”
Access to modern energy: a review of barriers, drivers and impacts (2016, methodology): “The 4 The tool from Baird et al. (2013) which has been used in the paper is reported in the online appendix. take-up of preventive and remedial practices and products is very effective in reducing the burden of morbidity and mortality, such as malaria, HIV/AIDS and waterborne and respiratory…”
Turning a Shove into a Nudge? A "Labeled Cash Transfer" for Education † (2015, background): “…recent studies have shown that the incentives that conditionality (or at least perceived conditionality) give to parents may have an additional impact on educational investments, beyond the pure income effect that comes about from unrestricted cash transfers (see Baird et al. 2013, for a review).”
Cash transfers and labor supply: Evidence from a large-scale program in Iran (2018, positive): “There is also a smaller but expanding literature that examines the impact of cash transfers, conditional or unconditional, on labor supply (Bandiera et al. 2017; Banerjee et al. 2015; Bosch and Manacorda 2012; Mena and Hernani-Limarino 2015). The findings of this literature do not show a negative la”