Unconditional Money

A brilliantly reported, global look at universal basic income—a stipend given to every citizen—and why it might be the answer for our age of rising inequality, persistent poverty, and dazzling technology. Imagine if every month the government deposited $1,000 into your checking account, with no strings attached and nothing expected in return. It sounds crazy. But it has become one of the most influential and discussed policy ideas of our time. The founder of Facebook, President Obama’s chief economist, Canada and Finland’s governments, the conservative and labor movements’ leading intellectual lights—all are seriously debating versions of a UBI. In this sparkling and provocative book, economics writer Annie Lowrey looks at the global UBI movement. She travels to Kenya to see how a UBI is lifting the poorest people on earth out of destitution, India to see how inefficient government programs are failing the poor, South Korea to interrogate UBI’s intellectual pedigree, and Silicon Valley to meet the tech titans financing UBI pilots in expectation of a world with advanced artificial intelligence and little need for human labor. Lowrey also examines the challenges the movement faces: contradictory aims, uncomfortable costs, and most powerfully, the entrenched belief that no one should get something for nothing. The UBI movement calls into question our deepest intuitions about what we owe each other. Yet as Lowrey persuasively shows, a UBI—giving people money—is not just a solution to our problems, but a better foundation for our society in this age of marvels.

In rural West Africa, the rate of out-of-school children is high and delayed entry to primary school is common, particularly for girls. Using the randomized roll-out of an unconditional cash transfer program (Jigisemejiri) in Mali, we examine its impact on child schooling by age and sex. The program leads to significant improvements in schooling outcomes for girls, but not boys. Improvements among girls are especially salient among younger (ages 6–9) and older (ages 15–18) girls. Pathway analysis reveals that the program reduces the time younger girls spend in agricultural work at home and the time older girls spend in domestic work as well as self-employment. Households in the program also spend more on education for older girls in terms of school fees, materials, and transport.

Hunger and acute child malnutrition are increasingly concentrated in fragile countries and civil conflict zones. According to the United Nations, Yemen’s civil war has caused the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in recent history. We use high-frequency panel data and district fixed-effects and household fixed-effects models to estimate the impact of civil conflict on child nutrition. Our results indicate that an increase by one standard deviation in civil conflict intensity translates into an increase in the prevalence of acute child malnutrition by at least 0.7 percentage points if measured by weight-for-height z-scores and by at least 1.7 percentage points if measured by mid-upper arm circumference z-scores. In mid-December 2018, Yemen’s main warring parties agreed to a ceasefire for the contested port city of Hodeida and to allow humanitarian aid to be shipped in and distributed through protected corridors. While the recent agreements are an important, first step to tackle the humanitarian crisis, the road to a sustainable peace agreement will certainly be long and bumpy. Relative stability could soon open a window of opportunity for targeted interventions to support recovery in Yemen. Against this background, our analysis suggests that unconditional cash transfers can be an effective tool in situations of complex emergencies. Our estimation results show that cash transfers can mitigate the detrimental impact of lingering civil conflict on child nutritional status in Yemen on a large scale. Our results also reveal that the regularity of transfer payments influence the magnitude of the mitigation effect, as regular assistance allows beneficiary households to smoothen their food consumption and other demands influencing child nutrition outcomes.

* Argues strongly for overlooked approach to development by showing how the poor use money in ways that confound stereotypical notions of aid and handouts * Team authored by foremost scholars in the development field Amid all the complicated economic theories about the causes and solutions to poverty, one idea is so basic it seems radical: just give money to the poor. Despite its skeptics, researchers have found again and again that cash transfers given to significant portions of the population transform the lives of recipients. Countries from Mexico to South Africa to Indonesia are giving money directly to the poor and discovering that they use it wisely “ to send their children to school, to start a business and to feed their families. Directly challenging an aid industry that thrives on complexity and mystification, with highly paid consultants designing ever more complicated projects, Just Give Money to the Pooroffers the elegant southern alternative “ bypass governments and NGOs and let the poor decide how to use their money. Stressing that cash transfers are not charity or a safety net, the authors draw an outline of effective practices that work precisely because they are regular, guaranteed and fair. This book, the first to report on this quiet revolution in an accessible way, is essential reading for policymakers, students of international development and anyone yearning for an alternative to traditional poverty-alleviation methods.

This timely book makes accessible to a broad audience the ideas, principles and practicalities of establishing effective social protection in Africa. It focuses on the major shift in strategy for tackling hunger and vulnerability, from emergency responses mainly in the form of food transfers to predictable cash transfers to the chronically poorest social groups. The first part of the book comprises nine theme chapters, covering vulnerability, targeting, delivery, coordination, cost-effectiveness, market impacts, and asset effects, while the second part consists of fifteen social protection case studies. The continuous interplay between these two parts makes for a unique contribution to the contemporary literature on social protection. The book takes a positive and forward looking view regarding the feasibility of achieving successful social transfers to the poorest in Africa; nevertheless, a critical stance is taken where appropriate, and unresolved strategic issues regarding the targeting, coverage and scale of social transfers are highlighted. Social Protection in Africa is an essential read for personnel, advisors and consultants working for aid donors, United Nations agencies, NGOs and governments on social transfer programmes in sub-Saharan African countries. In addition, the book represents a valuable resource for training courses on social protection, and will be vital reading for Masters level students and researchers studying emergency relief, social protection, vulnerability and poverty reduction in low-income countries.

Essay from the year 2019 in the subject Business economics - Miscellaneous, grade: 1,0, University of Copenhagen, language: English, abstract: This essay aims to investigate the effects of conditional and unconditional cash transfer and its ́impacts on alleviating poverty. Although the number of people living in extreme poverty has declined significantly in recent years, today it still accounts for over 10% of the world’s population living on less than $1.90 a day. An internationally agreed goal is to reduce this number to zero by 2030 A common approach to bring people out of poverty and kick-start a virtuous cycle are direct cash transfers . Conditional cash transfers (CCTs), such as microcredits, as they are granted by the Grameen Bank for almost three decades, have generated considerable hope and enthusiasm for fast poverty reduction. However, in recent years there are increasing numbers of studies reporting no poverty alleviating effects and even talk about negative impact. The organization GiveDirectly (GD), founded in 2011, pursues a different approach with the allocation of unconditional cash transfers (UCTs).