Does the impact of cash transfers differ across poverty measures? Evidence from Pakistan

Zaira Najam () and Susan Olivia
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Zaira Najam: University of Waikato, https://www.waikato.ac.nz/about/faculties-schools/management/

Working Papers in Economics from University of Waikato

Abstract: Cash transfers have been increasingly used in developing countries as key elements of social protection and poverty reduction strategies. Pakistan is no exception. In 2008, Pakistan introduced the Benazir Income Support Program (BISP) as an unconditional cash transfer targeted at the poorest of the poor. In this paper, we use five poverty measures, calculated biennially from 2008 to 2014 for 100 districts in Pakistan to assess the effectiveness of the BISP in alleviating poverty. We also examine whether the impact of the cash transfer programs on poverty is sensitive to the choice of poverty measure. Our results show that BISP is associated with poverty reduction using either the conventional money-metric poverty measures or multidimensional poverty measures, however the impact is much larger for the conventional poverty measures, which are distributionally insensitive. The implication is that public policy analysts should be cautious in the conclusions they draw from poverty estimate when evaluating welfare programs.

Keywords: poverty; cash transfers; multidimensional; social protection; Pakistan (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I32 I38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2021-09-21
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev
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