Cash Transfers, The State and Women Empowerment in South Asia
Economic Policy, Applied Economics
Final Report Abstract
Cash transfers, a popular policy instrument for poverty reduction and other development goals, are frequently targeted at women. Women constitute a particularly vulnerable group in many developing countries and the gender gap for all development outcomes remains large worldwide due to skewed power relations at both the household and societal levels. In this project, we extend the literature on the effects of cash transfers in order to rigorously investigate their influence on women’s interaction with the state as beneficiaries and women’s decision-making power. The objective is to evaluate Pakistan’s national cash transfer program (Benazir Income Support Program) to estimate (i) the effect of cash transfers on women’s state service use, and two important channels that may mediate this effect: women’s ease of access to services and their trust in the state and (ii) the effect on women’s decision-making power both at household level and at the political level through voting. To this end, we collect primary data through surveys and lab-in-the-field experiments and exploit a discontinuity in individual poverty scores that determine eligibility for the program. The political instability of Pakistan during the project period, unfortunately, made a second data collection after the pilot survey impossible. The pilot survey was analyzed, but sample size is very small. Future statistical analysis thus aims at acquiring and analyzing administrative data.
