Child Benefit and Poverty in Suriname

Abstract

The government of Suriname recently started increasing the budget for the social protection system and with the recent oil discovery, future expenditure is likely to increase further. These developments raise the question of whether the benefits actually have an impact on individual poverty. In this paper the effect of receiving child benefit on different poverty indicators will be investigated using the propensity score matching method and fixed effects models. The results from the propensity score matching method show that receiving child benefit significantly mitigates the negative effect that an increasing number of children has on total consumption, food consumption and the multidimensional poverty index. Since there are potential spillover effects, the matching was only performed on 3 poverty related variables, the child benefit amount received is minimal and the results are not confirmed by the fixed effect regressions, it can not be said with certainty that this relation is causal. However, the association is clear and especially when the Surinamese population is going to receive a higher amount of child benefit in the following years, it would be useful to continue studying the impact of child benefit on poverty in the future.