Conventional wisdom hails Latin American experience with conditional cash transfers (CCTs) as successful, but, to the authors' knowledge, there have been no rigorous analyses of the respective costs and benefits of conditional versus unconditional transfers. The impact of conditionality itself...

Children are disproportionately represented among the income-poor, many suffer from severe deprivation, and their poverty and vulnerability have cumulative and long-term consequences. This article provides a comparative examination of the poverty-reduction effectiveness of cash transfer...

With a particular focus on Sub-Saharan Africa, this paper explores the radical and potentially game-changing idea of allocating most Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) to social cash transfers. It concludes that financially it would be possible to reach many or even most of the poorest...

Conditional Cash Transfers are increasingly used by development aid agencies to reduce the incentives for migration from low-income countries. The evidence to date suggests that such transfers typically increase the rate of migration when they are conditional on investment, such as investment in...

The major international humanitarian donors and aid organisations have raised concerns about the efficiency and effectiveness of targeting Official Development Assistance. Although the 2016 Grand Bargain committed to shifting a quarter of the aid funds to the local actors, performance has...