The holy grail for development economists is to identify an affordable policy intervention that will help the poorest escape poverty. We know that living a longer and better life is correlated with many things: higher income from having a job, living in a house with clean water and sanitation, and access to better schools and health facilities, to name a few. But the trouble comes when we try to write policy to improve these things: which investment, given limited resources and political constraints, will most benefit children from poor households? And why? A new paper* published in the American Economic Review last month by a team of economists and psychologists offers an answer. It uses a longitudinal unconditional cash transfer programme – the Great Smoky Mountains Study in North Carolina – to examine how a cash boost for parents affected children’s outcomes. Children from 11 counties were interviewed annually from age 9 until the age of 16. Their parents were interviewed at the same time. One subsection of these children are American Indians. These American Indian families began to receive, five years after the first survey, direct cash transfers from the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians tribal government as a result of a new casino that came into operation. The cash transfers were provided to all adult citizens of the tribe, regardless of their employment conditions, marital status, or the presence of young children. This is basically equivalent to a universal Basic Income Grant, a policy that is gaining popularity in academic circles.
One policy to rule them all
One policy to rule them all
One policy to rule them all
The holy grail for development economists is to identify an affordable policy intervention that will help the poorest escape poverty. We know that living a longer and better life is correlated with many things: higher income from having a job, living in a house with clean water and sanitation, and access to better schools and health facilities, to name a few. But the trouble comes when we try to write policy to improve these things: which investment, given limited resources and political constraints, will most benefit children from poor households? And why? A new paper* published in the American Economic Review last month by a team of economists and psychologists offers an answer. It uses a longitudinal unconditional cash transfer programme – the Great Smoky Mountains Study in North Carolina – to examine how a cash boost for parents affected children’s outcomes. Children from 11 counties were interviewed annually from age 9 until the age of 16. Their parents were interviewed at the same time. One subsection of these children are American Indians. These American Indian families began to receive, five years after the first survey, direct cash transfers from the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians tribal government as a result of a new casino that came into operation. The cash transfers were provided to all adult citizens of the tribe, regardless of their employment conditions, marital status, or the presence of young children. This is basically equivalent to a universal Basic Income Grant, a policy that is gaining popularity in academic circles.