World Bank compliments the Fijian Government

A World Bank study says that the Fijian government's decision to give cash to families affected by Cyclone Winston was the correct one.

The World Bank study looked at the way Fiji used its social protection system to provide cash transfers to the most vulnerable households in the country.

The study says 90,000 people or 10% of the total population were paid a lump sum of three hundred US dollars under the poverty benefits scheme to cover expenses for three months and 17,000 pensioners over the age of 68, through the Social Pension Scheme, received an additional hundred and fifty US dollars one month after the cyclone hit.

Pacific Beat says at the time, economists said it was a pump priming exercise designed to inject a lot of cash to keep the economy going.

But the World Bank's social protection economist Jesse Doyle says the money was used very efficiently for exactly the right reasons, and this could be a useful lesson for disaster recovery efforts in other Pacific nations.

Doyle made it clear that 99%of the recipients used the money to rebuild their lives when asked by ABC’s Bruce Hill on the issue that people spent money on kava, alcohol and cigarettes.