IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ebl/ecbull/eb-15-00350.html

Direct income transfers and public good provisioning: choosing between two anti-poverty schemes

Author

Listed:
  • Diganta Mukherjee

    (Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India)

  • Sreenivasan Subramanian

    (ICSSR National Fellow, affiliated to Madras Institute of Development Studies)

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the economics of choosing between two types of anti-poverty programme: targeted direct income transfers and the universal provisioning of a public good. We construct a simple analytical model to examine the issue. As might be expected, our results suggest that the choice between the two poverty-alleviation schemes would depend on the relative strengths of the productivity of public goods investment on the one hand, and the information costs of targeting benefits, on the other.

Suggested Citation

  • Diganta Mukherjee & Sreenivasan Subramanian, 2015. "Direct income transfers and public good provisioning: choosing between two anti-poverty schemes," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 35(3), pages 1450-1458.
    • Handle: RePEc:ebl:ecbull:eb-15-00350
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.accessecon.com/Pubs/EB/2015/Volume35/EB-15-V35-I3-P145.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Besley, Timothy & Coate, Stephen, 1992. "Workfare versus Welfare Incentive Arguments for Work Requirements in Poverty-Alleviation Programs," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 82(1), pages 249-261, March.
    2. Ravallion, Martin, 1990. "On the coverage of public employment schemes for poverty alleviation," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 34(1-2), pages 57-79, November.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Raghav Gaiha, 2004. "Is There a Case for the Employment Guarantee Scheme in India? Some Recent Evidence," ASARC Working Papers 2004-09, The Australian National University, Australia South Asia Research Centre.
    2. Miguel Székely, 1997. "Opciones de políticas para la paliación de la pobreza," Research Department Publications 4063, Inter-American Development Bank, Research Department.
    3. Miguel Székely, 1997. "Policy Options for Poverty Alleviation," Research Department Publications 4062, Inter-American Development Bank, Research Department.
    4. Raghav Gaiha, 2000. "On the Targeting of the Employment Guarantee Scheme in the Indian State of Maharashtra," Economic Change and Restructuring, Springer, vol. 33(3), pages 203-219, October.
    5. Christophe MULLER & Sami BIBI, 2008. "Focused Transfer Targeting against Poverty Evidence from Tunisia," Thema Working Papers 2008-37, THEMA (Théorie Economique, Modélisation et Applications), CY Cergy-Paris University, ESSEC and CNRS.
    6. Dutta, Puja & Murgai, Rinku & Ravallion., Martin & van de Walle, Dominique, 2012. "Does India's employment guarantee scheme guarantee employment ?," Policy Research Working Paper Series 6003, The World Bank.
    7. Christophe Muller & Sami Bibi, 2006. "Focused Targeting against Poverty Evidence from Tunisia," IDEP Working Papers 0602, Institut d'economie publique (IDEP), Marseille, France, revised Apr 2006.
    8. Stern, Nicholas, 2018. "Public economics as if time matters: Climate change and the dynamics of policy," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 162(C), pages 4-17.
    9. Martin Ravallion, 2022. "On the Gains from Tradable Benefits‐in‐kind: Evidence for Workfare in India," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 89(355), pages 770-787, July.
    10. Boadway, Robin & Marceau, Nicolas & Sato, Motohiro, 1997. "An Agency Model of Welfare and Disability Assistance," Queen's Institute for Economic Research Discussion Papers 273383, Queen's University - Department of Economics.
    11. Ronnie Schöb, 2003. "Workfare and Trade Unions: Labor Market Repercussions of Welfare Reform," CESifo Working Paper Series 942, CESifo.
    12. Eitan Regev & Michel Strawczynski, 2021. "The optimal long‐run earned income tax credit," International Journal of Economic Theory, The International Society for Economic Theory, vol. 17(3), pages 284-308, September.
    13. Hoffmann, Bridget, 2018. "Do non-monetary prices target the poor? Evidence from a field experiment in India," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 133(C), pages 15-32.
    14. Rinku Murgai & Martin Ravallion & Dominique van de Walle, 2016. "Is Workfare Cost-effective against Poverty in a Poor Labor-Surplus Economy?," The World Bank Economic Review, World Bank, vol. 30(3), pages 413-445.
    15. Maitreesh Ghatak & François Maniquet, 2019. "Universal Basic Income: Some Theoretical Aspects," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 11(1), pages 895-928, August.
    16. Gregory Clark & Marianne E. Page, 2019. "Welfare reform, 1834: Did the New Poor Law in England produce significant economic gains?," Cliometrica, Springer;Cliometric Society (Association Francaise de Cliométrie), vol. 13(2), pages 221-244, May.
    17. Jules Gazeaud & Victor Stephane, 2023. "Productive Workfare? Evidence from Ethiopia's Productive Safety Net Program," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 105(1), pages 265-290, January.
    18. Cairo, Sofie & Mahlstedt, Robert, 2021. "Transparency of the Welfare System and Labor Market Outcomes of Unemployed Workers," IZA Discussion Papers 14940, IZA Network @ LISER.
    19. Benjamin A. Olken & Monica Singhal, 2011. "Informal Taxation," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Association, vol. 3(4), pages 1-28, October.
    20. Louis-Pascal Mahé, 2004. "Compte rendu d'ouvrage - Les apports de l’économie rurale des 20 dernières années à travers le Tome 2 du Handbook of Agricultural Economics," Post-Print hal-01201083, HAL.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • I3 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty
    • H2 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ebl:ecbull:eb-15-00350. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: John P. Conley (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.