Payments to Resolve Inequalities and Climate Change (PRICE) -- Pilot

We aim to implement a randomized controlled trial (RCT) in Ghana. This proposal describes a pilot of such RCT. The focus of the study is the Premix Fuel Program, a “conditional” program subsidizing fuel use among fishermen along the Ghanaian coast. Between January 2017 and August 2021, 407,740,500 liters of Premix fuel were supplied to fishermen, for an average of about 90 million liters per year. Our research design aims to randomize a fraction of beneficiaries across localities that currently receive conditional digital transfers for premix fuel to receive equivalent “unconditional” digital transfers in a way that allows for clean measurement of relevant outcomes, aggregate and general equilibrium impacts.

2025-01-01

2025-03-31

Fishing and other economic activities by canoe owners and other fishermen; fuel use and pollution; working hours and income for all villagers; price of fish; public support; well-being.

We aim to provide a proof-of-concept and shed light on (i) implementation challenges and the potential for a full RCT; and (ii) preliminary indications of relevant outcomes to be tracked in a full RCT and other feedback to be shared by the fishermen. In the full RCT, we plan to measure unconditional payments’ direct impact on treated localities and beneficiaries, including general equilibrium effects (if any). We plan to do so for a range of (i) business, (ii) environmental, and (iii) household outcomes. The business outcomes include profits, sales revenue and competition, income, productivity, firm exits and entries, employment, bundling of fishing with non-fishing activities, investment in and switch to other (potentially more) productive enterprises, maintenance. The environmental outcomes include purchases and usage of premix fuel and local air pollution. We plan to measure these outcomes using a mix of hard data and survey data. The household outcomes include consumption expenditure, poverty, human capital. Given the non-permanent feature of our intervention, we expect lower-bound effects with respect to a permanent intervention.

Our study focuses on fishermen in several localities along the coast of Ghana who receive “conditional” fuel subsidies under the Premix Fuel Program, which is administered by our research partners, the NPA and the National Premix Committee. We assign localities to either treatment or control.

Our treatment corresponds to random replacement of “conditional” digital transfers for Premix fuel (status quo) with their equivalent “unconditional” digital transfers (treatment). We focus on three landing beaches with at least 400 fishermen where 100% of program beneficiaries are treated. We plan for unconditional cash payments to replace fossil fuel subsidies for about three months. We survey the treated communities with pre and post surveys as well as more than 10 untreated communities to build the control group and to compare response and attrition rates.

Not available

Pilot of a full-scale RCT.

The unit is the landing beach (or community).

Yes

More than 10 landing beaches (communities).

Target of 1000 observations.

3 landing beaches (communities) in the treatment group, more than 10 landing beaches (communities) in the control group.