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...

During the recent Covid-19 shock (2020/21), most countries used cash transfers to protect the livelihoods of those affected by the pandemic or by restrictions on mobility or economic activities, including the poor and vulnerable. While a large majority of countries mobilized existing programs...

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,...

Policies to mitigate climate change are high on the political agenda and their distributional consequences are actively discussed. This paper makes two contributions to this discussion. First, it empirically identifies the spatial dimension between rural and urban households as important for the...

In this paper, we use a static fiscal incidence analysis model to evaluate the poverty and inequality impacts of using fiscal policy to finance expanded social spending in South Africa. We assess three methods to enhance the social protection system's equity objectives: increasing the size...

Individuals in the UK with health conditions may be entitled to two types of benefits - incapacity benefits (for those whose condition prevents them from working) and disability benefits (to help with extra living costs arising from the disability). Since the onset of the pandemic, there has...

This paper studies the effects of a large welfare benefit reduction on the children in the affected families. The welfare cut targeted adult refugees who received residency in Denmark, and it reduced their disposable income by 30 percent on average over the first five years. We show that...

Poverty maps are a useful tool for the targeting of social programs on areas with high concentrations of poverty. However, a static focus on poverty ignores the temporal dimension of poverty. Thus, current nonpoor households still face substantial welfare volatility and are at risk of becoming...