empirical evidence on the precise magnitude of such indirect impacts for the long-term income growth of the beneficiaries (reviewed in Alderman and Yemtsov 2013). However, all of these studies typically cover the effect of one program in one country, and it is hard to generalize across the world.

To approach the issue of cross-country comparability and comprehensiveness, we limit our attention to just the first, direct, channel of transfer impact on the current wellbeing of beneficiaries. For this we use household survey information and compute what the household’s income would be without the transfers it receives from social protection programs. Thus, generally the transfer value is subtracted from individual or household welfare<sup>30</sup> , providing a synthetic counterfactual. Of course these results are more indicative than authoritative since behavioral effects, for example, are not simulated.<sup>31</sup> In the short run, if households reduced their efforts to earn market income in response to income transfers through social protection, then this method would give an overestimate of the impact on poverty. Evidently _any_ medium term improvements in household market income discussed above, imply that the direct assessment would be an underestimate of the poverty and inequality impact. It is difficult to know where exactly the balance would come out, but our estimates can provide an anchor for discussion and sensitivity analysis.

Using the ASPIRE dataset and an international poverty line of $1.25 per day per capita in PPP, Figure 2 below uses this simulation to estimate how many people are moved out of poverty as a result of social protection transfers (by income groups of countries) in the ASPIRE surveys. If these estimation from surveys in ASPIRE are extrapolated to the world population in developing and emerging countries, almost 150 million people worldwide are prevented from falling into extreme poverty thanks to social protection.<sup>32</sup> This is a sizeable dent in global poverty which counts 1.4 billion people (at $1.25 a day). Taking the pre-transfer poverty headcount as the base, the average reduction in poverty across developing countries is about 45 percent. This impressive global impact differs across countries: it is largest in Eastern Europe and Central Asia and smallest in Sub-Saharan Africa, where only 1 percent of the population moves out of poverty thanks to social protection transfers.

> 30 Welfare is a measure of well-being, and is defined either as per capita income or consumption

31 For example, it is assumed that if a person stops receiving a pension, he or she will try to survive on the remaining income after the pension is taken away. In practice that person can seek assistance from relatives and community that will partly compensate this loss of income, so will not be as poor as assuming no replacement. 32 This is based on assumption that 56 countries in ASPIRE are broadly representative of their regional peers currently not in the ASPIRE data set. If there is some correlation between the presence of data on social protection and real effort in providing social transfers, then extrapolating from surveys to countries without surveys will provide an overestimate of the number of people affected by social protection in the world. At the same time, since most surveys do not entirely capture all social protection programs in countries (for reasons of data collection costs), the ASPIRE itself may be underestimating the poverty impact of social protection in countries it covers. Thus there are forces pulling in opposite directions which tend to cancel each other out, giving us some confidenc at least for the range of estimates we produce, but it is difficult to know the net effect precisely.

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