Gender based taxation (GBT) has been recently proposed as a promising policy in order to improve women's status in the labour market and within the family. We use a microeconometric model of household labour supply in order to evaluate, with Italian data, the behavioural and welfare effects of...

Development of the social dimension of Europe was advanced by the Lisbon Summit in March 2000, and this paper considers the future direction of social policy. The first step towards a social agenda could take the form of benchmarking, based on national competencies in this field, with Member...

In order to understand whether a reduction in overall poverty has improved the situations of the poorest, it is crucial to distinguish them from the moderately poor population. In this paper, we explore the mechanisms to distinguish subsets of the poor in a multidimensional counting framework....

We contribute to the literature on trends in living standards in Tanzania by analysing child welfare using two multi-dimensional approaches, first-order dominance (FOD) and Alkire-Foster (AF). Between 1991/92 and 2010, remarkably similar area rankings emerge that suggest a widening gap between...

We explore the relationship between connections and public transfers in decentralized poverty-targeting programmes. Using panel data from Vietnam we find evidence that households with connections to local government are more likely to be classified as poor, the main determinant of whether...

Brazil's recent growth has been intensely pro-poor, and both poverty and inequality have declined significantly in the last decade. It has been suggested that Brazil's unexpected successes are the outcome of a new model of development. The paper argues that Brazil's unique combination of...

Policy frames in Brazil have long run up against conflicting visions and understandings about the causes and consequences of group-based inequality. This paper argues that a class-based lens has dominated the social protection framework. In recent years, political leaders have framed social...

A large share of the population in Zambia is living below the national poverty line. To reduce poverty, in 2019, the government initiated the Cash Plus reform, which aims to build on the existing Social Cash Transfer as a floor benefit with additional benefits to take account of the...

Standard growth incidence curves describe how growth episodes impact on the overall income distribution. However, measuring the pro-poorness of the growth process is complex due to (i) measurement errors and (ii) effect shocks that may hit the percentiles of the income distribution in different...

We study the effectiveness of social protection benefits in reducing income and consumption poverty in five sub-Saharan African countries-Ghana, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia-in normal times and times of widespread economic crisis. Using tax-benefit microsimulation models with...