Who chooses? a response to Jishnu Das
There was widespread admiration in my Twitter stream yesterday for an article by World Bank Senior Economist Jishnu Das slamming The Economist for its support for making cash transfers to the poor conditional. I am less convinced by it.
Jishnu finds it ‘ridiculous’ that the Economist could reach the conclusion that conditional transfers are attractive based on the following evidence:
School enrolment among families that got conditional grants rose by 41% on average in the various programmes; the increase among those that got unconditional grants was only 23%. If conditions were implicit or soft (eg, if recipients were simply encouraged to take children to school), enrolment merely rose by 25%. The big difference came when conditions were tough (eg, if school attendance was mandatory): that boosted enrolment by 60%, a big bang for the relatively few bucks involved.
As he sees it, without conditions, parents are able to take better account of their own priorities, favouring nutrition or healthcare over education, or simply spending the money on beer so they can relax after a long day at work.
Any imposition of conditions suggests that donors know better than parents and is an example of the ‘purely elitist’ mind-set that bedevils development. “Has our hubris really taken us that far?” he asks, despairingly. “What happened to respect for the poor?” (more…)