Although politically attractive in the short-term, across-the-board subsidies come at huge fiscal and economic costs (Ravallion 2009; Grosh et al. They are difficult to reverse and are most often regressive, i.e. they distribute relatively more resources to the non-poor than to the poor. Scaling-up existing cash transfer schemes is easier than installing a programme from scratch. The ability to respond quickly depends on the quality of the existing programmes (Mitra et al.