Welfare-to-work measures are a central theme of Israel’s labour and social policies to tackle relative poverty, which is concentrated among the Arab-Israeli and Ultra-orthodox (Haredi) communities. Policies include pilot programmes involving private-sector job placement (the “Wisconsin”...

Lack of access to finance is often cited as a key reason for why poor people remain poor. This Paper uses data on the Indian rural branch expansion programme to provide empirical evidence on this issue. Between 1977 and 1990, the Indian central bank mandated that a commercial bank could open a...

Under the Universal Credit reform, the main means-tested benefits except the Council Tax Benefit will be pooled into one single benefit with one single taper rate. The reform will give people better incentives to work, reduce complexity and contribute to reducing poverty. The reform could reduce...

The crisis revealed the need for a strategic review of the existing social protection system in Estonia. Extreme income fluctuations on one side and low social benefits on the other side exposed fragile groups in the population to a significant poverty risk. The government has recently...

Poverty is an important policy issue in OECD countries and the recent crisis has made it even more pressing. This paper highlights poverty rate differences across countries and reviews the various policies to tackle it. The OECD-wide poverty rate has drifted up, reaching around 11% in the late...

Substantial fiscal consolidation was achieved under the aegis of the 2003 Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act. While deficits widened anew in 2008 and 2009, against the backdrop of the global financial and economic crisis, efforts to reduce them have resumed since. To ensure...

In recent years, policymaking in China has put increasing emphasis on stemming the growth in inequality, which had been fairly steep since the 1980s. Policy action has taken the form of regional development measures and of reforms of various aspects of the social safety net broadly defined. The...

There have been concerns that employment-enhancing reforms along the lines of the 1994 OECD Jobs Strategy could inadvertently lead to increased income inequality and poverty. This paper focuses on the impact of institutions and redistributive policies on inequality and poverty with the view of...

Reducing poverty and social exclusion is an important objective for all French governments. Even though conventionally measured poverty is in fact lower than in most other countries, it is still higher than can be easily accepted. The current policy approach involves a large number of measures...