This paper examines China's rural minimum living standard guarantee (dibao) program, one of the largest targeted transfer schemes in the world. Using household survey data matched with published administrative...
This paper reviews key issues in the 'cash versus food' debate, including as they relate to political economy, theory, evidence, and practice. In doing so, it benefited from a new generation of 12 impact...
The Skills Towards Employability and Productivity (STEP) program was designed to better understand the interplay between skills on the one hand and employability and productivity on the other. The STEP...
The adverse impacts of natural disasters and climate change constitute a major risk to the poor and near-poor. Poor men and women face disproportionately higher risks from these events because of their...
Disaster and climate related events exacerbate chronic and transitory poverty because poor and near-poor people have fewer coping and recovery mechanisms. In vulnerable countries, the increase in frequency...
For social protection spe¬cialists, effective stake¬holder communication takes on a heightened importance in the post disaster context. By definition, the socially marginalized are among the most vulnerable...
The new social insurance law introduced by the Jordanian government in 2010 was created in part to improve the likelihood of women’s employment through non- and gender specific changes. This study, which...
Having in place flexible benefit mechanisms which can provide timely and appropriate levels and types of benefits following disasters and climate change related events is critical. Doing so ensures that...
Developing and low-income countries around the world have been unable to provide old-age income security to all through contributory pensions. Neither reforms to pension systems nor general growth and...
Early integration of disaster risk management/climate change adaptation criteria into social protection programs’ monitoring and evaluation plans, systems, and budgets allows for more effective capture...
How much do countries spend on social protection? Do social protection programs cover all poor people? And, how well are they targeted? It is notoriously hard to find comprehensive cross-country data on...
Madagascar is one of the poorest countries in the world and a very high proportion of the population experiences frequent shocks, whether from natural disasters, economic shocks or internal crises of governance...
The Sudanese population has suffered from years of conflict, and deep-seated security issues have severely hampered Sudan’s long-term economic stability and social development. As a consequence, Sudan...
The report lays out options to use social safety nets to meet the goal set by the Government of Botswana to eradicate extreme poverty by 2016 and in a budget neutral way. Introducing a Family Support Grant...
Safety nets are on the rise in Africa, and beginning to evolve from scattered standalone programs into systems. Until recently, many African countries approached social protection on an ad-hoc basis. But...
Cash transfers have proliferated in the past decade as key policy instruments to tackle vulnerability and inequality. Payment mechanisms (PMs), the backbone of cash transfers, are the channels through...
This assessment provides recommendations to help the government of Sierra Leone to put its Social Protection Policy into action. Ten years after civil war, and in the aftermath of the global crises, the...
This report shows that while more inclusive growth is the ultimate solution to poverty in Lesotho, the country can and should use selective social transfers to reduce poverty more rapidly among the extreme...
The recently released United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) social protection strategic framework and the World Bank social protection and labor strategy call for taking a systems...
Several middle income countries are considering reforms of severance pay regulations to both increase flexibility for firms and better protect workers. Policy discussions then often revolve around whether...