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Households that are eligible for means-tested benefits do not always take them up, leading to potentially detrimental consequences associated with their unintended exclusion. This paper offers a framework for analysing non-take-up, covering households that are uninformed, misinformed, constrained or uninterested. Using quantitative evidence from an evaluation of a conditional cash transfer in Kazakhstan we compare the characteristics of enrolled and non-enrolled households and demonstrate that, before they receive transfers, households enrolled on that programme are typically less well-off than eligible households that do not join. We then apply the framework to explore qualitatively the reasons why this pattern occurs.
O’Brien et al. (Mon,) studied this question.