We have published a more recent version of this page. See our most recent version of this page. Cash transfers are an intervention that gives cash grants to poor people in low-income countries.
Those grants can either be unconditional, in which case funds are given without requiring recipients to take any specific action, or conditional, in which case the funds are tied to specific actions recipients take.
This intervention report, which was last updated in , discusses both types of cash transfers but focuses on unconditional cash transfers. We use unconditional cash transfers as a benchmark for comparing the cost-effectiveness of different funding opportunities see here for more information about our current funding bar. The program conducted by GiveDirectly is different from most of the cash transfer programs that have previously been studied because it aims to transfer wealth rather than income , and not exclusively to business-owners.
We review the results of all three different types of cash transfer programs that have been studied, including a randomized controlled trial of a variant of GiveDirectly's program , in order to address the likely effects of GiveDirectly's cash transfers. In the case of conditional cash transfers, we focus on impacts that do not seem relevant to the conditionality itself, e. Below is a list of the cash transfer programs evaluated by randomized controlled trials RCTs that we reviewed for our initial report in We discuss many of the studies in more detail on our old cash transfer review page.
For a list of the studies we identified in our update of this report, see this footnote. A more detailed version of this table is available here XLS. GiveDirectly's program is substantially different from nearly all cash transfer programs that have previously been studied.
