A new study has found that income support measures in low and middle-income countries helped reduce the spread of Covid-19. While income s...
A new study has found that income support measures in low and middle-income countries helped reduce the spread of Covid-19. While income support measures were aimed primarily at securing livelihoods at a time of lockdown, this new research shows it also had a prominent secondary effect in allowing people to stay at home, thus helping them follow pandemic restrictions better.
This points to a relevant debate about what kind of state support measures could have led to better public health outcomes during the pandemic. For instance, India’s Covid-19 relief package mostly focused on providing free rations to people, with almost no income support. As a result, some experts had called for more income support measures such as cash transfers to also be included.
How did lockdowns play out?
Globally, the biggest response to contain Covid-19 has largely been centred around restricting the movement of people. As per reports, almost half of the world’s population was under some form of a lockdown by the first week of April 2020.
The study, titled “Poverty and exposure to Covid-19: The role of income support”, by Ulugbek Aminjonov, Olivier Bargain and Tanguy Bernard, from the University of Bordeaux in France shows that income support such as cash transfers allowed people in poorer-income areas to...
