Anticipatory Cash Transfers in Climate Disaster Response

Ashley Pople, Ruth Hill, Stefan Dercon and Ben Brunckhorst

No 2021-07, CSAE Working Paper Series from Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford

Abstract: In the face of increasing climate volatility and stretched aid budgets, more effective ways to support households in times of crisis are needed. This paper examines the welfare impact of an anticipatory cash transfer provided to households forecasted to experience extreme floods in Bangladesh. Evidence on the impact of a one-off transfer in a disaster are limited, despite the widespread use of such transfers in crises, reflecting more broadly a dearth of evaluations in the humanitarian sector. To assess impact, we exploit administrative constraints experi-enced during the programme roll-out caused by the quick onset of the flood and restrictions on movement as a result of Covid-19, to compare treated households with otherwise comparable households which did not receive the cash transfer. We find that the anticipatory cash transfer was mostly spent on food and water, and that treated households were 36% less likely to go a day without eating during the flood. Three months after the flood, households that had received the transfer reported significantly higher child and adult food consumption and well¬being. They also experienced lower asset loss, engaged in less costly borrowing after the flood, and reported higher earning potential. Our results are robust to alternate control group defi¬nitions and model specifications. These benefits from the anticipatory cash transfer occurred before a traditional humanitarian response would normally arrive, highlighting the benefits of being early. We find that small changes in timing matter: receiving the cash a day earlier resulted in a small and marginally significant increase in welfare.

Keywords: finance and microfinance; climate change; anticipatory humanitarian action (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 O12 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-dev and nep-env
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:12ea16b2-edc0-4af5-8824-132aba4557bd (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:csa:wpaper:2021-07

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CSAE Working Paper Series from Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Julia Coffey ().