The impact of employment guarantee schemes and cash transfers on the poor

• Jessica Hagen-Zanker, and others
• Overseas Development Institute

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11 July 2011This systematic review identifies and synthesizes the current evidence on employment guarantee schemes (EGSs) and cash transfers (CTs) in order to assess the effectiveness of these interventions in terms of poverty outcomes for the poor in low and middle income countries. The review describes and analyses the empirical evidence currently available, in terms of content, quality, and comparability, and identifies research gaps, offering a contribution to future evaluation and policy development.

This review applied a systematic protocol to the identification and retrieval of published and unpublished documents relating to the impacts of i) EGSs and ii) CTs on the poor (defined in relation to national poverty lines), and examines the relative effectiveness of both interventions. Using consistent search strings, searches in 23 databases resulted in the identification of 35,991 documents for screening. Searches of 19 websites and journals, together with bibliographies and key informant interviews led to the inclusion of an additional 193 studies for screening. 222 studies were retained on the basis of full text for final quality screening after the application of inclusion and exclusion criteria. By restricting inclusion to studies using high quality datasets, and presenting evidence addressing money-metric dimensions of poverty (relating to income, expenditure, or poverty indices) and excluding those using duplicate datasets and identical methodological approaches, the final number of studies included in the review was reduced to 37.

Critically, in terms of the analytical approach anticipated within a systematic review, it was not possible to draw robust conclusions regarding the relative performance of the two instruments, since meta-analysis of evidence on programme impacts was not feasible given the diversity of intervention design, populations and impacts, the range and inconsistency of methodological approaches adopted, and the limited data on statistical significance and incidence.

Authors: Jessica Hagen-Zanker, Anna McCord and Rebecca Holmes with Francesca Booker and Elizabeth Molinari.