Social Protection and Food Security in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Evaluation of Cash Transfer Programmes

Giorgio d'Agostino, Luca Pieroni and Margherita Scarlato

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper evaluates the effects of cash transfer (CT) programmes introduced during the 1990s and 2000s on food security in a sample of sub-Saharan African countries. We apply the synthetic control method to compare changes in the post-intervention food insecurity trajectories of economies affected by CT programmes relative to their unaffected counterparts. The results suggest that CT programmes exert differential effects on the prevalence of undernourishment. Although the estimates in the upper-middle income countries in our sample show mixed effects for the application of CT programmes on food insecurity, these effects appear to be important in low-income and fragile sub-Saharan countries. Robustness analysis via placebo experiments confirms the soundness of our results, and their implications for policymakers are discussed.

Keywords: Sub-Saharan Africa; food security; social protection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q1 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-09-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-agr and nep-dev
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/49536/1/MPRA_paper_49536.pdf original version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/55265/1/MPRA_paper_55265.pdf revised version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/60888/1/MPRA_paper_60888.pdf revised version (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:pra:mprapa:49536

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().