Locked down and locked out: Repurposing social assistance as emergency relief to informal workers
Locked down and locked out: Repurposing social assistance as emergency relief to informal workers
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DOI：
10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.105271
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发表时间：
2021-03-01
影响因子：
6.9
通讯作者：
Ranchhod, Vimal
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Bassier, Ihsaan;Budlender, Joshua;Ranchhod, Vimal
2019冠状病毒病大流行对劳动力市场非正规程度高的国家提出了特别挑战。非正式工人及其家庭特别容易受到大流行和相关封锁措施的负面经济后果的影响，而他们的非正式性本身就使政府难以迅速提供有针对性的经济救济。以南非为例，我们研究了一个既定的社会援助体系——最初不是为支持非正规工人而设计的——如何重新定位，为这些工人及其家庭提供紧急救济。我们研究了如何在密集边际（增加现有社会赠款的价值）和广泛边际（引入新的可行实施的赠款）上扩大这一制度，以减轻与covid -19相关的贫困。我们通过使用流行病前具有全国代表性的家庭调查数据来比较不同政策的效果，以预测如何通过不同的社会赠款措施减轻对非正规收入的负面冲击，并特别强调对贫困的影响。我们发现，扩大现有的儿童抚养补助金是对广泛引入新的COVID-19特别补助金的补充，这种综合政策干预在考虑的选项中效果最好。然而，关于这一“最佳政策”的结论并不是简单的技术决定。我们表明，这些结论实际上对不可避免的关于资源如何在家庭内消耗和共享的技术假设以及关于优先考虑哪些人口以及如何评估非目标群体之间的减贫溢出效应的规范性价值判断都很敏感。虽然我们的方法有助于确定一系列明智的政策方法，但我们的知识或规范性目标问题的局限性是无法逃避的——这一发现可能适用于广泛的实证政策分析。(c) 2020 Elsevier Ltd.版权所有。
The COVID-19 pandemic presents a particular challenge to countries with high levels of labour market informality. Informal workers and their households are especially vulnerable to the negative economic consequences of the pandemic and associated lockdown measures, while the very fact of their informality makes it difficult for governments to quickly provide targeted economic relief. Using South Africa as a case study, we examine how an established social assistance system-not originally designed to support informal workers-can be re-purposed to provide emergency relief to these workers and their households. We examine how expansions of this system on the intensive margin (increasing the value of existing social grants) and extensive margin (introducing a new feasibly-implemented grant) can be used to mitigate this COVID-19-associated poverty. We compare the efficacy of the different policies by using pre-pandemic nationally representative household survey data to project how a negative shock to informal incomes can be mitigated by the different social grant measures, with a particular emphasis on poverty impacts. We find that an intensive-margin expansion of the existing Child Support Grant is complementary to the extensive-margin introduction of a new Special COVID-19 Grant, and that this combined policy intervention performs best out of the options considered. However conclusions as to this "optimal policy" are not simple technical determinations. We show that these conclusions are in fact sensitive to both unavoidable technical assumptions about how resources are consumed and shared within the household, as well as to normative value judgments about which populations to prioritise and how to value poverty reduction spillovers amongst the non-targeted group. While our approach helps identify a range of sensible policy approaches, there is no escaping the limits to our knowledge or the issue of normative goals-a finding likely applicable to a broad range of empirical policy analyses.(c) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.