Public Transfers and Participation Decisions in Botswana's Subsistence Economy

In 2005 the Government of Indonesia introduced an unconditional cash transfer program called the ‘Bantuan Langsung Tunai’ (BLT), aimed at assisting poor people who were suffering from the removal of a fuel subsidy. There are concerns, however, that the introduction of a public transfer system can negatively affect inter-household transfers through the crowding-out effect, which exists when donor households reduce the amount of their transfers in line with public transfers received from the government. The poor may not therefore have received any meaningful impact from the public cash transfer, as they potentially receive fewer transfers from inter-household private donors. For the government to design a public transfer system, it is necessary to properly understand the dynamics of private transfer behaviour. Hence, this study evaluates whether there exists a crowding-out effect of public transfers on inter-household transfers in Indonesia.Using data from the Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS) and by applying Coarsened Exact Matching (CEM) and Difference-in-differences (DID) approaches, this study found that the likelihood to receive transfers from other family members (non-co-resident) reduces when the household receives BLT. However, there is no significant impact of BLT on transfers from parents and friends.

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Public Financing of Human Development in India: A Review

Indian Journal of Human Development ◽

10.1177/09737030211005043 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 15 (1) ◽

pp. 62-81

Author(s):

Sacchidananda Mukherjee ◽

Shivani Badola

Keyword(s):

Economic Growth ◽

Human Capital ◽

Human Development ◽

Public Investment ◽

Public Financing ◽

Economic Activities ◽

Economic Opportunities ◽

Goods And Services ◽

Public Transfers ◽

Distribution Of Resources

Role of public financing of human development (HD) is inevitable, especially for developing countries like India where access to resources and economic opportunities are not equitably distributed among people. Governments aim to achieve equity in distribution of resources through allocative and redistributive policies whereas macroeconomic stabilisation policies aim to achieve higher economic growth and stability in the price level. Expenditure policies of the governments envisage in delivering larger public goods and services to enable people to take part in economic activities by investing in human capital and infrastructure developments. Progressivity of the tax system helps in achieving equity by redistribution of resources among people. Being merit goods, expenditures on education, health, and poverty eradication make it a case for public investment which empowers people to improve human capital. The benefit of universal economic participation is expected to contribute in larger mobilisation of public resources over time. Lack of economic opportunities and earning a respectable income may increase dependence on public transfers which may reduce fiscal space of the governments to finance programmes to promote overall economic growth. The objective of this article is to review existing studies on public financing of HD in India and highlight emerging challenges.

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Population aging and the historical development of intergenerational transfer systems

Genus ◽

10.1186/s41118-020-00100-8 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 76 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Ronald Lee

Keyword(s):

Older People ◽

Population Aging ◽

Intergenerational Transfers ◽

The Elderly ◽

Intergenerational Transfer ◽

Agricultural Revolution ◽

Public Transfers ◽

Working Age ◽

Social Sharing ◽

Private Transfers

Abstract From our evolutionary past, humans inherited a long period of child dependency, extensive intergenerational transfers to children, cooperative breeding, and social sharing of food. Older people continued to transfer a surplus to the young. After the agricultural revolution, population densities grew making land and residences valuable assets controlled by older people, leading to their reduced labor supply which made them net consumers. In some East Asian societies today, elders are supported by adult children but in most societies the elderly continue to make private net transfers to their children out of asset income or public pensions. Growing public intergenerational transfers have crowded out private transfers. In some high-income countries, the direction of intergenerational flows has reversed from downward to upwards, from young to old. Nonetheless, net private transfers remain strongly downward, from older to younger, everywhere in the world. For many but not all countries, projected population aging will bring fiscal instability unless there are major program reforms. However, in many countries population aging will reduce the net cost to adults of private transfers to children, partially offsetting the increased net costs to working age adults for public transfers to the elderly.

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Poverty and Sources of Income Support Among Older People With Disabilities and Out of Work: Comparison of Canada and the United Kingdom

Journal of Social Policy ◽

10.1017/s0047279421000209 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-21

Author(s):

WEN-HAO CHEN ◽

LEE BENTLEY ◽

MARGARET WHITEHEAD ◽

ASHLEY MCALLISTER ◽

BENJAMIN BARR

Keyword(s):

United Kingdom ◽

Income Support ◽

Disabled People ◽

Liberal Democratic ◽

The United Kingdom ◽

Poverty Risk ◽

Public Transfers ◽

Low Educated ◽

The Uk ◽

Government Transfers

Abstract The debate about extending working lives in response to population ageing often overlooks the lack of employment opportunity for older adults with disabilities. Without work, their living standards depend heavily on government transfers. This study contributes to the literature on health inequalities by analysing the sources of income and poverty outcomes for people aged 50 to 64 in two liberal democratic countries yet with contrasting disability benefit contexts – Canada and the United Kingdom. This choice of countries offers the opportunity to assess whether the design of benefit systems has led the most disadvantaged groups to fare differently between countries. Overall, disabled older persons without work faced a markedly higher risk of poverty in Canada than in the UK. Public transfers played a much greater role in the UK, accounting for two-thirds of household income among low-educated groups, compared with one-third in Canada. The average benefit amount received was similar in both countries, but the coverage of disabled people was much lower in Canada than in the UK, leading to a high poverty risk among disabled people out of work. Our findings highlight the importance of income support systems in preventing the widening of the poverty-disability gap at older ages.

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Family Ties: Women's Work and Family Histories and their Association with Incomes in Later Life in the UK

Journal of Social Policy ◽

10.1017/s0047279410000255 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 40 (1) ◽

pp. 41-69 ◽

Cited By ~ 22

Author(s):

TOM SEFTON ◽

MARIA EVANDROU ◽

JANE FALKINGHAM

Keyword(s):

Older Women ◽

Close Association ◽

Later Life ◽

Work And Family ◽

Positive Finding ◽

Work History ◽

Family Histories ◽

Public Transfers ◽

Work Histories ◽

Personal Incomes

AbstractThis article examines the relationship between the family and work histories of older women and their personal incomes in later life, using retrospective data from the first 15 waves of the British Household Panel Survey. The association between women's family histories and their incomes later in life are relatively weak, explaining only a small proportion of the overall variation in older women's incomes. Divorce, early widowhood and re-marriage are not associated with any significant differences in older women's incomes, while motherhood is only associated with a small reduction in incomes later in life. While there are significant differences in the work histories of older women with different family histories, this translates into relatively small differences in their personal incomes, because the types of employment career pursued by most women are not associated with significantly higher retirement incomes and because public transfers dampen work history-related differentials, especially for widows. On the one hand, this could be seen as a positive finding in that the ‘pension penalty’ associated with life-course events such as motherhood and divorce is not as severe as often anticipated. On the other hand, the main reason for this is that the pension returns to working longer are relatively low, particularly for women with few qualifications. The analysis suggests that women retiring over the next two decades are unlikely to benefit significantly from the additional years they have spent in employment, because most of this increase has been in part-time employment. The article highlights the tensions between two objectives: rewarding work, and protecting the most vulnerable, such as carers, long-term disabled and unemployed. Resolving this dilemma involves moving away from a close association between pension entitlements and work history and towards universal entitlement based on a citizen's pension.

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Art and Archaeology

Greece and Rome ◽

10.1017/s0017383512000344 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 60 (1) ◽

pp. 176-179

Author(s):

Nigel Spivey

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Attractive Feature ◽

Personal View ◽

Subsistence Economy ◽

Islamic School ◽

The People ◽

Annales School ◽

The Temple ◽

Of Greece

The front cover of John Bintliff's Complete Archaeology of Greece is interesting. There is the Parthenon: as most of its sculptures have gone, the aspect is post-Elgin. But it stands amid an assortment of post-classical buildings: one can see a small mosque within the cella, a large barrack-like building between the temple and the Erechtheum, and in the foreground an assortment of stone-built houses – so this probably pre-dates Greek independence and certainly pre-dates the nineteenth-century ‘cleansing’ of all Byzantine, Frankish, and Ottoman remains from the Athenian Akropolis (in fact the view, from Dodwell, is dated 1820). For the author, it is a poignant image. He is, overtly (or ‘passionately’ in today's parlance), a philhellene, but his Greece is not chauvinistically selective. He mourns the current neglect of an eighteenth-century Islamic school by the Tower of the Winds; and he gives two of his colour plates over to illustrations of Byzantine and Byzantine-Frankish ceramics. Anyone familiar with Bintliff's Boeotia project will recognize here an ideological commitment to the ‘Annales school’ of history, and a certain (rather wistful) respect for a subsistence economy that unites the inhabitants of Greece across many centuries. ‘Beyond the Akropolis’ was the war-cry of the landscape archaeologists whose investigations of long-term patterns of settlement and land use reclaimed ‘the people without history’ – and who sought to reform our fetish for the obvious glories of the classical past. This book is not so militant: there is due consideration of the meaning of the Parthenon Frieze, of the contents of the shaft graves at Mycenae, and suchlike. Its tone verges on the conversational (an attractive feature of the layout is the recurrent sub-heading ‘A Personal View’); nonetheless, it carries the authority and clarity of a textbook – a considerable achievement.

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