Public Works Programs

IntroductionPublic works programs (PWP), also called workfare or cash-for-work programs, are government policies that provide employment to support the income of the poor.They are one of the most popular forms of antipoverty policy around the world: The Report on the State of Safety Nets by the World Bank (2015) found them active in ninety-four countries.There is also a long tradition of using PWP in economic downturns, from droughts in precolonial South Asia (Drèze and Sen 1991), to the 1930s depression in the United States (Fishback 2017), and the 2001 financial crisis in Argentina (Galasso and Ravallion 2004).Throughout the nineteenth-century, work houses were the main, if not the only, option for the poor to receive public assistance in England, Europe, and North Amer i ca (Ravallion 2015).The justifications for imposing work requirements rather than just giving cash to the poor were moral and political, but also economic: Work houses disincentivized the poor from relying on assistance for too long and used their workforce for productive purposes.Besley and Coate (1992) formalized these arguments to explain how "workfare" (PWP) could achieve better pro-poor targeting than "welfare" (cash transfers) when governments lack information on who is poor.The largest contributor to our understanding of PWP is Martin Ravallion.He proposed a general theory and brought the first empirical evidence in the 1990s (Ravallion 1990(Ravallion , 1991;; Datt and Ravallion 1994).He kept pushing the research frontier through the 2000s (Jalan and Ravallion 2003; Galasso and Ravallion 2004; Ravallion et al. 2005) and the 2010s (Murgai et al. 2016; Dutta et al. 2014; Alik-Lagrange and Ravallion 2018).We review the theoretical and empirical lit er a ture on PWP.They have attracted a lot less attention than cash transfers, which is why many of the papers we review are recent, oftentimes still working papers.On the methodological side, the evaluation of PWP also lags that of cash transfer, with few well-powered experimental designs and many small-scale, often quasi-experimental studies.The paucity of studies is problematic because PWP can take very dif fer ent forms: Some are short-term while others are permanent, some are universal while others are targeted, some define eligibility at the house hold level and others at the 11