Can emergency cash buy food security?

Did Cambodia's COVID-era cash transfers improve food security? Evidence from a recent paper by UNU-MERIT’s Ari Perdana, Kristof De Witte, and Wim Groot suggest they did.

When COVID-19 struck, concerns moved quickly from public health to livelihoods. Across the developing world, lockdowns, business closures and lost incomes threatened households' ability to put food on the table. Cambodia was no exception. In 2020, the country largely avoided the severe health consequences seen elsewhere but its economy was hit hard. Tourism collapsed, exports weakened, and many households experienced sharp declines in income.

Unlike many developing countries, Cambodia entered the crisis with an important advantage. For years, the government had invested in IDPoor, a nationwide registry used to identify poor households. In 2019, it had also launched a cash-transfer programme for pregnant women and young children. These foundations proved invaluable when COVID-19 arrived.

In June 2020, the government introduced the COVID-19 Cash Transfer Programme (CTP-COVID), providing monthly payments to poor and vulnerable households. Existing IDPoor beneficiaries were enrolled automatically, while newly affected households could apply through an on-demand registration process. By regional standards, the programme was rolled out quickly and at scale. Within months, it became one of the largest social-assistance interventions in Cambodia's history.

Assessing the impact

In a paper recently published in the Journal of Development Studies, we examine whether the  Programme helped protect poor households from food insecurity during the pandemic.i We used data from Cambodia's High-Frequency Phone Survey, conducted between 2020 and 2022. Food security was measured using the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES), an internationally recognised indicator based on households' reported experiences of food-related hardship, ranging from worrying about food to skipping meals. As with any phone survey, the data may underrepresent the poorest and hardest-to-reach households. Even so, its repeated observations offer a rare window into household welfare during a rapidly evolving crisis.

At first glance, the programme appears to have failed. A simple comparison shows that beneficiary households reported higher levels of food insecurity than non-beneficiaries. But that conclusionn  would be misleading. The programme was designed to target the poorest and most vulnerable households—the very families most likely to experience food insecurity in the first place.

To address this selection problem, we used Coarsened Exact Matching (CEM), a statistical method that compares beneficiaries with observationally similar non-beneficiaries. By creating more comparable groups, the approach provides a more credible estimate of the programme's impact.

The results suggest that the programme helped the beneficiaries. Once comparable households are matched, beneficiaries reported significantly better food-security outcomes than non-beneficiaries. The programme reduced FIES scores by around half a point— equivalent to roughly a 12–13% improvement relative to baseline levels reported in August 2020—and lowered the likelihood of moderate food insecurity. The benefits were particularly pronounced among female-headed households and households experiencing income losses during the pandemic.

The programme's effectiveness came with a substantial fiscal cost. At its peak, it required around $29m per month, equivalent to roughly 1.2% of GDP on an annualised basis. For Cambodia, this was a sizeable undertaking. The findings point to a familiar policy trade-off: emergency cash transfers can protect vulnerable households during severe shocks, but sustaining such programmes requires fiscal space that many developing countries lack.

Beyond the pandemic

Cambodia's experience offers a useful lesson for policymakers. Cash transfers can be deployed rapidly and at scale when governments have robust social registries and delivery systems before a crisis hits. Yet effectiveness is only part of the equation. As countries strengthen their social-protection systems, they must also confront the question of how such programmes can be financed when the next crisis arrives.

The findings should nevertheless be interpreted with caution. The analysis relies on observational rather than experimental data, and matching methods cannot eliminate every source of bias. Even so, the evidence points in a consistent direction. Well-targeted cash transfers can help protect food security during severe economic shocks. As climate-related disasters, pandemics and economic disruptions become more frequent; social-protection systems may increasingly serve not merely as safety nets, but as national shock absorbers.