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Government assistance to the poor-especially cash and similar benefits-has always sparked heated debates. Who deserves support? How much support, and for how long? Should poor people have to do something in return for the benefits? Won't social welfare make people lazy? The answer to that last question, based on empirical evidence from developing countries, is a resounding no. Nobel laureate Abhijit Bannerjee and colleagues debunked "the myth of the lazy welfare recipient" in 2015, finding no evidence that cash transfer discourage work.
That same year, an evaluation of cash transfers in the Philippines found that adults in poor households that received the money were actually more likely to be looking for work than those in poor households that did not. And yet the myth seems to persist, including in Mongolia, where policymakers and the public have long worried that cash payments to the poor must be causing welfare dependency and work disincentives.
Now a new study prepared with ADB technical assistance counter those worries. - blog.adb.org/blogs
A version of this article appears in the print on February 10, 2022, of The Himalayan Times.
