The effect of cash transfers on mental health – new evidence from South Africa

BACKGROUND: Mental health and poverty are strongly interlinked. There is a gap in the literature on the effects of poverty alleviation programmes on mental health. We aim to fill this gap by studying the effect of an exogenous income shock generated by the Child Support Grant, South Africa’s largest...

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Autores principales: Ohrnberger, Julius, Fichera, Eleonora, Sutton, Matt, Anselmi, Laura
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2020
Materias:
Research Article
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7118950/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32245377
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-020-08596-7
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author Ohrnberger, Julius
Fichera, Eleonora
Sutton, Matt
Anselmi, Laura
author_facet Ohrnberger, Julius
Fichera, Eleonora
Sutton, Matt
Anselmi, Laura
author_sort Ohrnberger, Julius
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Mental health and poverty are strongly interlinked. There is a gap in the literature on the effects of poverty alleviation programmes on mental health. We aim to fill this gap by studying the effect of an exogenous income shock generated by the Child Support Grant, South Africa’s largest Unconditional Cash Transfer (UCT) programme, on mental health. METHODS: We use biennial data on 10,925 individuals from the National Income Dynamics Study between 2008 and 2014. We exploit the programme’s eligibility criteria to estimate instrumental variable Fixed Effects models. RESULTS: We find that receiving the Child Support Grant improves adult mental health by 0.822 points (on a 0–30 scale), 4.1% of the sample mean. CONCLUSION: Our findings show that UCT programmes have strong mental health benefits for the poor adult population.
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spelling pubmed-71189502020-04-07 The effect of cash transfers on mental health – new evidence from South Africa Ohrnberger, Julius Fichera, Eleonora Sutton, Matt Anselmi, Laura BMC Public Health Research Article BACKGROUND: Mental health and poverty are strongly interlinked. There is a gap in the literature on the effects of poverty alleviation programmes on mental health. We aim to fill this gap by studying the effect of an exogenous income shock generated by the Child Support Grant, South Africa’s largest Unconditional Cash Transfer (UCT) programme, on mental health. METHODS: We use biennial data on 10,925 individuals from the National Income Dynamics Study between 2008 and 2014. We exploit the programme’s eligibility criteria to estimate instrumental variable Fixed Effects models. RESULTS: We find that receiving the Child Support Grant improves adult mental health by 0.822 points (on a 0–30 scale), 4.1% of the sample mean. CONCLUSION: Our findings show that UCT programmes have strong mental health benefits for the poor adult population. BioMed Central 2020-04-03 /pmc/articles/PMC7118950/ /pubmed/32245377 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-020-08596-7 Text en © The Author(s) 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
spellingShingle Research Article
Ohrnberger, Julius
Fichera, Eleonora
Sutton, Matt
Anselmi, Laura
The effect of cash transfers on mental health – new evidence from South Africa
title The effect of cash transfers on mental health – new evidence from South Africa
title_full The effect of cash transfers on mental health – new evidence from South Africa
title_fullStr The effect of cash transfers on mental health – new evidence from South Africa
title_full_unstemmed The effect of cash transfers on mental health – new evidence from South Africa
title_short The effect of cash transfers on mental health – new evidence from South Africa
title_sort effect of cash transfers on mental health – new evidence from south africa
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7118950/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32245377
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-020-08596-7
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