Studies from 2016 on demonstrate that the impact of cash transfers varies based on duration, depending on whether they are distributed over a short (24 months or less) or long (more than 24 months) period. Cash transfers distributed over a long period provide predictability that is associated...

Cash transfers in general appear to be more effective than in-kind transfers or vouchers at improving a range of outcomes, including decreasing monetary poverty, improving health and nutrition, and increasing food security, across diverse country contexts, program objectives, and design...

To help policy makers make practical programmatic design choices, this series summarizes recent literature on cash transfers and explains how the design of cash transfer programs can affect outcomes. The series is launched with an initial set of five thematic briefs on benefit size, timing...

Cash-transfer payment mechanisms abound and have diversified greatly in recent years. Payments can be made manually (in person) on a set schedule at a brick-and-mortar location such as a bank, post office, or government office or digitally via mobile money, biometrically authenticated smart...

A growing body of evidence finds that cash transfers reduce intimate partner violence (IPV) in various contexts, even when the cash transfer was not designed to do so. The effects are comparable with standalone violence-prevention interventions and consistent with various forms of IPV (physical,...

This brief examines the effects of varying cash transfer values on outcomes by reviewing the evidence since 2016, inclusive of the COVID-19 pandemic. For the purposes of this brief and based on the sample of studies examined, high-value cash transfers refer to those greater than 30 percent of...

Lottery, a simple random draw, has been used in selecting beneficiaries of public work programs in context as diverse as Argentina and the Central African Republic. However, despite a burgeoning literature on targeting, this approach has hardly been studied. This policy note discusses how...

The unprecedented and ongoing scale-up of social protection responses to the COVID-19 pandemic dwarf the response to the Great Recession. But how are countries financing such scale-up efforts? This note lays out ten stylized findings from a rapid review of social protection financing sources in...

In the last few years, proposals to introduce a universal basic income or universal basic income (UBI) have proliferated. Proponents point out that narrowly targeted programs exclude many of the poor. Critics point out that universality spreads limited resources thinly over the population...