Research question/goal:

The project "Education, Poverty and Inequality in South Asia" aimed to empirically analyse poverty and interventions to reduce poverty in South Asia, with a particular emphasis on female empowerment. The analysis focused on Pakistan, the second-largest country in South Asia. One objective was to examine the impact of cash transfers on women’s decision-making power at household level and at the political level through voting. A second objective was to examine whether cash transfers, i.e., interventions to reduce poverty, also increase trust in the state and the use of state services by poor women. Specifically, we aimed to evaluate Pakistan’s national cash transfer program (Benazir Income Support Program), which provides financial support to poor households, using a regression discontinuity design by exploiting the threshold level (poverty score threshold) of the means-tested welfare programme. Hence, the idea was to exploit a discontinuity in individual poverty scores that determine eligibility for the program. Unfortunately, due to political instability in Pakistan during an extended period, the planned large-scale household survey could not be conducted. Instead, only a very small sample was collected, which provides anecdotal insights for a potential follow-up project.
The empirical findings from the small sample indicate that beneficiaries of cash transfers show higher levels of trust than non-beneficiaries. Two possible explanatory factors were explored: the perceived fairness of the program and positive perceptions of the state’s capability. Furthermore, in behavioural games, female beneficiaries claimed a smaller share when dividing cash between themselves and their spouses than non-beneficiaries. Nevertheless, all women received substantive allocations in joint decisions, probably because of their increased financial independence owing to the cash transfers. On the other hand, the survey results also indicate that despite their increased financial decision-making power, women have limited agency over non-monetary decisions. Given that these findings are based on a very small urban sample, they may not be generalisable to the broader population. A potential follow-up project could explore their empirical validity using a larger sample size.