The paper seeks to take stock of some of the key APEC documents/reports relevant to social protection and safety net programs, and also of the experience of APEC member-economies, with special focus on the Philippines, in implementing social protection measures. In particular, it attempts to...

We analyze microdata from Mexico's survey on household income and expenditures (ENIGH) to study the evolution of income inequality in Mexico over 2004-16, identify its sources, and investigate how it was affected by government social policy. We find evidence of only a small decline in inequality...

The Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program has been much maligned and dismissed as a "dole-out" program. Critics have focused on the fact that it provides cash grants directly to poor families, believing it would promote the culture of mendicancy and dependence. Others believe that the grants would...

The Philippines recently introduced two distinct but related large-scale social protection programs that, first, provides conditional cash transfers (CCT) to poor households, and, second, automatically enrolls them into the government's social health insurance program. This has resulted to...

This paper reviews the current state of and challenges facing social protection in the Philippines. It describes the social protection institutions and the schemes that have been developed throughout the years. It also provides an assessment focusing on coverage, administration, and management....

Italy’s system of social protection has come under criticism for being fragmented and excessively skewed toward pensioners and “insiders.” After setting up a consolidated presentation of the social security accounts, this paper provides an empirical assessment of the effectiveness of the...

Throughout the world, the great popularity of programs to protect those who may fall into poverty stands in contrast with the weakness of policies aimed at helping individuals who are already poor to overcome long-term poverty. In the paper, an OLG model with persistent poverty and limited...

In Jordan, a system of general food subsidies became untenable in budgetary terms, with a sharp devaluation of the dinar in the late 1980s. A shift from a general subsidy system to limited rations would greatly reduce budgetary costs and minimize adverse effects on the poor. To reduce subsidies,...

In designing policy measures, including possible social safety nets, targeted to the poor, it is important to fully understand the efficiency implications of these measures. There is abundant macroeconomic literature on their negative effects on the poor’s work effort. The literature, however,...