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  3. Just giving out cash to poor people is a pretty good way to make them less poor. That might seem obvious, but it wasn’t a common

Just giving out cash to poor people is a pretty good way to make them less poor. That might seem obvious, but it wasn’t a common

admin2020-08-17  36
问题     Just giving out cash to poor people is a pretty good way to make them less poor. That might seem obvious, but it wasn’t a commonly held viewpoint in development charities until relatively recently. Jacquelline Fuller, who runs Google’s philanthropic arm, has said that when she first pitched one of her bosses on supporting GiveDirectly (a charity doing unrestricted cash transfers), he replied, "You must be smoking crack. "
    But in part due to groups like GiveDirectly, and in even larger part due to the success of government programs like Brazil’s Bolsa Familia and Kenya’s cash program for orphans and vulnerable children, that stigma has dissipated. Cash is cool now, at least in some corners.
    And for good reason. The most common arguments against giving out cash—that it’s wasted on drugs and alcohol, or makes recipients stop working—have been debunked in repeated studies, and a review of hundreds of studies measuring dozens of different outcomes suggests that cash programs can increase food consumption, boost school attendance, and improve nutrition. If nothing else, cash just mechanically makes people less poor. It’s not a cure-all and has real limitations, but it’s pretty good, and "pretty good" can be hard to find in international development.
    One advantage of having a pretty good rough-and-ready way to help poor people abroad is that it gives you something to test against. This is called "cash benchmarking", and it’s something that cash fans, like GiveDirectly’s co-founder Paul Niehaus, have promoted for years. The idea is that because cash works reasonably well, respects the independence of recipients, and is relatively easy to hand out at minimal administrative expense, aid agencies should test programs to see if they meet their objectives better than cash would. If they don’t, that’s a pretty good argument to either improve the program or switch to cash.
    USAID, the American foreign aid agency, made news in October by testing a nutrition program a-gainst cash. The two performed about equally well, with maybe a slight advantage to the cost-equivalent cash program; a much bigger cash program had really outstanding impacts.
    But as a number of development professionals pointed out after I profiled the USAID program, that’s not the full story. At least two other studies have compared complex non-cash aid programs to cash—and beat cash.
    Both studies invoke programs commonly known in the development word as " ultra-poor graduation" programs, as they’re meant to "graduate" beneficiaries out of extreme poverty.
    Graduation programs try to target the very poorest people in already very poor countries. Instead of only giving cash, they give valuable assets (which could be money but could also be an animal like a goat or cow, or equipment like a bicycle or sewing machine) as well as training, mentoring, and ongoing support (and sometimes some cash too, to buy food and keep people going). The hope is that giving some start-up capital and some business skills helps recipients build a small ongoing enterprise-—a small vegetable or dairy farming operation, say, or a bicycle messenger service, or a seamstress shop. That, in turn, is meant to enable a durable escape from poverty.
    But recent research has suggested the graduation approach is promising. A massive randomized study published in 2015 by a murderer’s row of prominent development economists—including Northwestern’s Dean Karlan and MT’s Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, among others—found that a graduation program tested in Ethiopia, Ghana, Honduras, India, Pakistan, and Peru significantly increased income and savings, reduced hunger and missed meal, and improved mental health, on average. It worked in every country but Honduras, where people fell behind when the chickens they were given died of disease.
According to US AID, ________.
选项 A、a cash program is better than a nutrition program
B、a cash program works as well as a nutrition program
C、cash programs might be less expensive
D、small cash programs might not be effective at all
答案A
解析 事实细节题。第六段第二句指出，现金资助和营养资助取得的效果差不多，在花费相等的情况下，现金资助可能稍显优势，故答案为A项，同时排除B项。C项文中未提及，故排除。该句后半句指出，越大的现金资助项目效果越显著，但没有讲小规模的现金资助有没有效果，故D项也排除。
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