South Africa's social assistance system represents a major intervention by government in addressing the deprivation amongst the country's population. The system is extensive in terms of both the number of people it covers, directly and indirectly, as well as in terms of the amount of scarce...

Nepal's recent transition to a federal state structure provides a historic juncture to realize the role that social protection can play in achieving the constitutional goals of equity, inclusion, and prosperity. The transition to a federal structure of governance and the promulgation of a new...

This paper examines the economic foundations of some recently proposed criteria for evaluating the benefits of social programs. These criteria are appropriate for comparing a class of revenue-constant policies. They replace foundational principles of social opportunity costs with accounting...

This report presents the results of a diagnostic study on the targeting of social protection programs in Uzbekistan with a specific focus on low-income family allowances. The objective is to determine the extent to which current programs are reaching the poor and can reduce poverty, and...

This report profiles poverty and assesses the performance of the social assistance (SA) system in the Turkish Cypriot community (TCc). The aim of this report is to provide information and evidence-based analysis to policy-makers on the determinants of poverty in the TCc and on the effectiveness...

We study the effects of welfare generosity on international migration using reforms of immigrant welfare benefits in Denmark. The first reform, implemented in 2002, lowered benefits for non-EU immigrants by about 50%, with no changes for natives or EU immigrants. The policy was later repealed...

The extent to which households can self-insure and the government can help them to do so depends on the wage risk that they face and their family structure. We study wage risk in the UK and show that the persistence and riskiness of wages depends on one's age and position in the wage...

The passage of the 1996 welfare reform bill led to sweeping changes to the central U.S. cash safety net program for families with children. Importantly, along with other changes, the reform imposed lifetime time limits for receipt of welfare de facto ending the entitlement nature of cash welfare...

High rates of understatement are found for many government transfer programs and in many datasets. This understatement has major implications for our understanding of economic well-being and the effects of transfer programs. We provide estimates of the extent of under-reporting for ten transfer...