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

Journal: BMC public health

Volume: 20

Issue: 1

Year of Publication: 2020

Affiliated Institutions:  Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London, School of Public Health, Praed Street, St Mary's Campus, London, UK. j.ohrnberger@imperial.ac.uk. Department of Economics, University of Bath, Bath, UK. Division of Population Health, Health Services Research & Primary Care, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK.

Abstract summary 

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.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.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.Our findings show that UCT programmes have strong mental health benefits for the poor adult population.

Authors & Co-authors:  Ohrnberger Julius J Fichera Eleonora E Sutton Matt M Anselmi Laura L

Study Outcome 

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Statistics
Citations :  Allen J, Balfour R, Bell R, Marmot M. Social determinants of mental health. Int Rev Psychiatry. 2014;26(4):392–407. doi: 10.3109/09540261.2014.928270.
Authors :  4
Identifiers
Doi : 436
SSN : 1471-2458
Study Population
Male,Female
Mesh Terms
Adult
Other Terms
Cash transfer;Fixed effects;Instrumental variable estimation;Mental health;Poverty;South Africa
Study Design
Cross Sectional Study
Study Approach
Country of Study
South Africa
Publication Country
England