Search results for "Cash transfers"
showing 5 items of 5 documents
A new aid modality for Africa
2013
Preprint of an article published in the Journal of Economic Policy Reform with the title:“Stimulating economic growth in the least developed countries: Direct cash transfers for the retired via mobile phones,” The result of current aid policies is that only a small percentage of foreign aid reaches the poorest of the poor in the least developed countries. Current trends of urbanisation and self-reliance place elderly people in an increasingly difficult situation. This paper aims to stimulate debate by introducing an alternative mechanism for foreign aid. With the help of an economic model, we demonstrate how direct cash transfers to elderly people can spur economic growth. Targeting all eld…
Micro-investment perspective and the potential of the universal basic income
2018
In this article, we explore the prospects of Basic Income (BI) as a development policy tool. Our approach is to analyse the BI as a tool for promoting micro-investments and as a general development policy instrument, thus deliberately departing from the perception of cash transfers as targeted poverty reduction tools. As experiences in testing BI systems in developing country contexts are limited to local and regional experiments in Namibia and India (Haarmann et al., 2009; Haarmann & Haarmann, 2012; Davala et al., 2015), conclusive assessments about the impacts of the BI cannot be drawn. Therefore, we aim to estimate potential impacts of the BI by synthesising existing knowledge. This esti…
Conditional cash transfers : empowerment resilience and good behaviours in development policies.
2018
Empowerment, resilience and poverty reduction strategies seem to be bound by mutual exclusion. Through poverty reduction and empowerment, people escape poverty and precarization processes by acquiring capabilities that give them both economic and existential stability; in a word, they acquire human resilience. Nevertheless, the relationship between the three concepts and their corresponding practices is characterized by a complementary link that works as a matrix of neoliberal subjectivation processes that involve both men and women on a global level. Said link is a broad and diverse one where other practices and concepts interact: i.e. vulnerability, securitization, care, responsibility an…
A New Aid Modality for Africa: Old Age Cash Transfers
2010
This paper examines the issue of foreign aid and cash transfers to individuals in low-income economies typically found in Africa. Old-age conditional cash transfers and new mobile banking technology can cope with the well-documented problems related to moral hazard and high transaction costs with such policy interactions. Cash transfers can stimulate old and retired individuals’ demand for the consumption goods and services, and thereby affect product prices and wages. Developing economies being characterised by underemployment and gross substitution between consumption and leisure, these transfers can stimulate the labour supply and increase capacity utilisation and the production of labou…
Stimulating economic growth in the least developed countries: direct cash transfers for the retired via mobile phones
2013
The result of current aid policies is that only a small percentage of foreign aid reaches the poorest of the poor in the least developed countries. Current trends of urbanisation and self-reliance place elderly people in an increasingly difficult situation. This paper aims to stimulate debate by introducing an alternative mechanism for foreign aid. With the help of an economic model, we demonstrate how direct cash transfers to elderly people can spur economic growth. Targeting all elderly people above a certain age minimises selection costs and removes perverse incentives. The use of new mobile phone technologies reduces transaction costs and makes our proposed modality feasible including i…