1 Introduction

Several countries have introduced emergency cash transfers in response to the covid crisis. Countries’ ability to implement cash transfers depend greatly on whether it has existing infrastructure to identify potential beneficiaries and to deliver cash payments. In this notebook, we analyze how cash transfer response varies by countries’ pre-existing identification and payments infrastructure.

2 Data and indicators

For each country in our dataset, we calculate two indicators: ease of identifying beneficiaries (EIB) and ease of delivering payments (EDP).

The EIB indicator seeks to measure the relative ease with which the country could identify new cash transfer beneficiaries. The EIB is calculated according to the following formula:

\[ EIB = .5ID+.25SI+.25SR \]

where ID is the proportion of adults with an ID according to the 2018 Findex survey, SI is the proportion of adults who actively contribute to social insurance, and SR is the proportion of the population covered in the national social registry (both SI and SR come from World Bank data).

The EDP indicator is calculated according to the following formula:

\[ EDP = (A-1)*max(1-C/150,0)+1 \] Where A is the proportion of adults with any sort of financial account and C is the total bank branches and ATMs per 100,000 adults (both from the 2018 Findex survey).

The graphs

3 Cash transfer response by readiness