Cash Transfers for Inclusive Societies: A Behavioral Lens

The latest title in the Behaviourally Informed Organizations series offers practical advice on how best to successfully design, deliver, and evaluate efficient cash transfer programs, with a view to alleviating poverty.

While much progress has been made in reducing poverty worldwide – especially in the pre-pandemic era – it is fair to say that an unacceptably large proportion of the world’s people still live in poverty. Cash Transfers for Inclusive Societies sheds light on the widely prevalent cash transfer programs. The book asks these central questions: What is the state of the art in the development of welfare programs? What do we know works in these programs and what does not? How can an understanding of behavioral science better inform the design, delivery, and evaluation of welfare programs?

The latest title in the Behaviourally Informed Organizations series, the book develops a nuanced framework for how governments, practitioners, and society in general should design cash transfer programs to improve inclusivity, reduce poverty, and improve equality. It draws on field experiments and case studies to showcase past successes, while also building frameworks and developing prescriptive advice that we can give to practitioners who are looking to design a behaviorally informed cash transfer program. With contributions from leading academics as well as seasoned practitioners, Cash Transfers for Inclusive Societies presents a new model to policymakers to study and shift the discourse on poverty alleviation from purely economic factors to also behavioral ones.

Jiaying Zhao is the Canada Research Chair in Behavioural Sustainability and an associate professor in the Department of Psychology and the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia..


Saugato Datta is Senior Advisor, Global Development at ideas42, Co-Founder, and Principal at Venn Advisors, an applied behavioral science collective, and Professor of the Practice at Tufts University.


Dilip Soman is the Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Behavioural Science and Economics, a professor at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, and the director of Behavioural Economics in Action at Rotman (BEAR) research centre.