13 pro-cyclical policies, made possible by the greater monetary and fiscal room to maneuver. More countries had countercyclical spending—some redirected fiscal resources to retain social services, some (temporarily) expanded safety nets, or used the crisis as an opportunity to achieve major reforms that improve efficiency and quality (e.g., Argentina channeled health funding to vulnerable people). Similarly, many countries in East Asia and the Pacific (including China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam) had varying forms of fiscal stimulus to boost flagging economic growth and counter social impacts.<sup>35</sup> Having strengthened their macroeconomic fundamentals after the 1997 crisis, many countries in the region had accumulated significant foreign reserves and had fiscal space to implement spending measures aimed at supporting their economies.

Faced with a loss of employment and earnings and reduced social support, individuals have adopted a range of coping strategies to survive the global financial crises. While continuation of the crisis makes it difficult to have a full assessment of the coping strategies used to date, a number of recent studies explored the nature of coping strategies in a selection of countries and regions around the world. Based on a survey of qualitative research on the coping responses used by poor and vulnerable people in 13 countries,<sup>36</sup> Heltberg, Hossain, Reva, and Turk 2012 found some evidence of costly coping measures by households in response to the recent financial, food and fuel crisis. Reducing the quality of food, the number of meals, and nonfood consumption were the most common behavior-based coping responses. Working longer hours, engaging in crime, and diversifying sources of income were common nearly everywhere. Migration, selling assets, borrowing from relatives, friends, and neighbors and pulling children out of school were also observed in about half of the countries surveyed. In Cambodia, household surveys complied from nine villages in 2008 and 2011 showed that 46 percent of the households that experienced shocks in 2008 drew on savings, 22 percent borrowed, 3.3 percent reduced consumption, close to 10 percent received assistance from relatives, and 4 percent sold cattle or migrated.<sup>37</sup> An analysis using cross-sectional household-level data from the 2010 _Life in Transition Survey_ for countries in Europe and Central Asia also documents costly coping strategies deployed by households in response to the income shocks associated with the global financial crisis. It finds that households reallocated spending from non-essential goods to staple foods to cushion income shocks from the labor markets (in the form of wage reductions) and cut back on health care, while education was largely insulated from income shocks. Reductions in staple-food consumption were strongest among low-income households. Diversified income sources, as well as access to informal and formal credit, helped households to cushion income shocks, especially in middle-income countries.<sup>38</sup> Another study exploiting Crisis Response Surveys, conducted in Armenia, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Romania and Turkey during 2009 and 2010, also found that households are likely to adopt health-related coping mechanisms (reduce visits to doctors and spending on medicines). While households affected by income shocks reduced their education investments, they did not adopt harmful education-related coping strategies, such as withdrawing children from school or moving children from costly private schools to cheaper public schools.<sup>39</sup>

> 35 UNICEF 2009.

> 36 Bangladesh, Cambodia, the Central African Republic, Ghana, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Mongolia, the Philippines, Serbia, Thailand, Ukraine, Vietnam, and Zambia. 37 Seing 2013.

> 38 Brown 2013.

> 39 Dasgupta and Ajwad 2011.