THREE ESSAYS ON POVERTY REDUCTION AND SOCIO-ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN MALAWI

Malawi remains one of the impoverished countries in the world with about 70 per cent of the population living below $1.9 a day as of 2018. In 2017, the country ranked 171 out of 189 countries in terms of the human development index. The government of Malawi is pursuing various public policies aimed at reducing poverty, building household resilience to shocks and spurring economic growth. One such policy is a nationwide social cash transfer programme (MSCT) aimed at ultra-poor, labor constrained households. The first paper examines the impact of the MSCT on household resilience, and formally tests the validity of the resilience measure. The result show that the MSCT has a positive impact on household resilience, and the resilience indicator is a valid measure of the construct in terms of its predictive power of the likelihood of households adopting positive coping mechanisms to future shocks. The main conclusion from this result is that the resilience index is a good candidate for profiling of household for interventions, and that cash transfers can be considered as a credible option in the search for interventions that seek to improve household resilience. The second paper examines the heterogeneous impacts of the MSCT on household consumption mobility to understand household characteristics and programme design features that could potentially predict sustainable escape from poverty. The results show that design features were the more consistent correlates of high mobility potential than household characteristics. The main conclusion from this paper is that the design features and implementation of cash transfer programs are key to ensure transformative impacts on beneficiaries. The third paper examined the potential and policy option that Malawi could adopt to realize a sizeable demographic dividend by leveraging on the ongoing demographic transition in the country. The analysis shows that even in the best-case scenario, the demographic dividend that would be realized would be moderate, and there is the need to continue to expand social protection programmes and policies to cater for the rising absolute numbers of poor people even if poverty rates fall moderately in the medium to long term.Doctor of Philosoph