We evaluate the effect of active labour market programs on the duration of unemployment in a reward or punish system. In Switzerland, unemployment benefits are conditional upon program attendance after 7 months of unemployment duration. In the evaluation we allow for selectivity affecting the...

In July 2000, the Taipei City Government launched an anti-poverty program, Taipei Family Development Accounts, which drew heavily on Sherraden¿s asset-based welfare theory, and was to provide matched savings accounts for low-income families in the City. This paper presents the ¿income to...

Since April 2002 Jobcentre Plus has started to operate nationwide in the UK providing fully integrated benefit claiming and work placement/job-seeking activities for people of working age. This new organisation put an explicit work-focus in the delivery of the benefit system. Along with...

The share of immigrants in the German social assistance program exceeds their population share and continues to grow. This study evaluates the causes of this phenomenon and tests for the effects of assimilation, cohort, age at migration, and country of origin on immigrant behaviour. It uses...

The single most likely way to leave the unemployment insurance (UI) register in Hungary is not by getting a job but by exhausting entitlement to benefit. Two questions follow. First, what are the implications of the cessation of UI for living standards? Second, does UI exhaustion have much...

This paper presents a tour of welfare reforms in the UK since the last change of government, summarising the most important changes in active labour market policies (ALMPS), and in measures intended to strengthen financial incentives to work. It argues that developments in the UK’s active...

This study tests for a migration response to the implementation of stricter rules for welfare benefit receipt, in the form of mandatory participation in activation programs for welfare recipients, in Stockholm town districts. The hypothesis is that welfare benefit prone individuals will choose...

This paper contributes to providing insights into the impact of decentralisation on poverty. It starts out with an overview of which role decentralisation plays in strategies and policies for poverty eradication and derives economic and political impact channels. It concentrates on the economic...

This study provides a comprehensive examination of the work and family structure incentives of public assistance, focusing on the consequences of state-determined programs. Such an approach allows state policy- makers to understand the tradeoffs implicit in their current program parameters. It...

Despite increasingly large scale social protection programs in Africa, we have limited evidence on the local political economy of their allocation. We investigate community-based processes for food aid allocation and the role of political and social networks, using the case of Ethiopia in the...