Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Global Food Security journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/gfs Assessing poverty alleviation through social protection: School meals and family benefits in a middle-income country Elmira Bakhshinyan a,* , Luca Molinas b , Harold Alderman c a Food Security Analyst at the World Food Programme Country Office, Yerevan, Armenia b The World Food Programme Regional Bureau, Cairo, Egypt c International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Washington, DC, USA ARTICLE INFO JEL Codes: H23 public economics I15 health Education and welfare I32 welfare Well-being Poverty O15 income distribution Keywords: Food security Social welfare Redistribution School meal programs Cash transfer programs ABSTRACT School meal programs are credited with improving food security and encouraging primary school enrollment. Yet the role of such programs may be evolving given progress in primary school participation as well as the availability of new instruments for social protection. This study assesses whether a school meal program in Armenia that originated as a response to the global financial crisis of 2008 serves as a wide but shallow safety net. We look at both changes in poverty measures as well as the welfare effect of the program using general measures of social welfare within the context of a class of social welfare functions. We show that only for extreme poverty or for comparatively strong social aversion to inequality does the school meal program have a noticeable welfare outcome. We compare this to the welfare effect of a concurrent – and larger – family benefit program. 1. Introduction School meal programs are politically popular, wide-spread, in-kind transfer programs that can be viewed as conditional on school atten- dance. They are present in nearly all countries, whether low, middle or upper income. Indeed, while only 12% of children attending school in low income countries receive meals at school, 37% of their counterparts in upper-middle income countries participate in such programs (Hunter et al., 2017). By 2013, the coverage of school meals in a survey of 169 countries reached 368 million children annually at a cost of $75 billion (WFP, 2013). Many of these programs are funded from domestic sources, although school meals programs are also supported by a range of foreign donors. For example, the United States allocated 193 million dollars in three continents through the McGovern-Dole Program in FY2017 (USDA, 2018), while the Russian Federation supports programs in neighboring countries, including Armenia, the focus of this study. These programs are variously claimed to contribute to school outcomes, nutrition, and social protection (Alderman and Bundy, 2011; Gelli et al., 2016). 1 These roles are context specific and, in many circumstances, initial objectives have evolved. There has been substantial progress in school enrollment in recent years; after stagnating for a decade net primary enrollment increased globally from 82.8% in 1999 to 89.5% in 2016 (World Bank, 2018). Although there remain many settings where in- centives to enroll in school can still show an impact on school out- comes, in many countries that provide school meals primary enrollment is saturated and grade repetition relatively uncommon, particularly in middle- and upper-income settings; many low income countries are also approaching universal primary initiation. Similarly, the objective of improving nutrition has evolved in recent years; increasingly countries see school meals as a means to address the challenge of obesity, rather than primarily to offset undernutrition (Drake et al., 2017). Thus, while there is substantial evidence on the schooling and nutritional objectives of school meal programs, this overall body of evidence may pertain to a https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gfs.2019.07.005 Received 19 April 2019; Received in revised form 8 July 2019; Accepted 22 July 2019 * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: elmira.bakhshinyan@wfp.org (E. Bakhshinyan), luca.molinas@wfp.org (L. Molinas), h.alderman@cgiar.org (H. Alderman). 1 Additionally, a goal of advancing small holder agriculture has recently been added to the objectives of school meal programs in many countries. While Armenia has also adopted a policy of local procurement, this program only began in 2016 and has not yet been assessed. Prior to that time, foods were purchased form the Russian Federation. Global Food Security 23 (2019) 205–211 2211-9124/ © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. T