A recent literature highlights the uncertainty concerning whether economic growth has any causal protective effect on health and survival. But equal rates of growth often deliver unequal rates of poverty reduction and absolute deprivation is more clearly relevant. Using state-level panel data...

We interpret social transfers broadly as a set of measures to reduce or relieve poverty, and study how well this purpose is served in the countries that participated in the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions in 2007. Motivated by the findings, we characterise a social...

Financial inclusion is the broad based delivery of banking and other financial services at affordable cost to the poorest sections of society. In India, financial inclusion emphasizes to include maximum number of people under formal financial systems. The most important part of financial...

This paper estimates the effect of enrollment in a large scale anti-poverty program in Colombia, Familias en Acción (FA), on intent to vote, turnout and electoral choice. For identification we use discontinuities in program eligibility and variation in program enrollment across voting booths....

To mitigate the impact of the 2008-2010 global financial crisis on vulnerable households, the Government of Latvia established Workplaces with Stipends, an emergency public works program that targeted registered unemployed people who were not receiving unemployment benefits. This paper evaluates...

This study aims to explore poverty measures, its dynamics and determinants using Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) and consumption poverty. Our results show that the two measures assign similar poverty status to about 52 percent of households and that both approaches confirm poverty is mainly...

This paper analyzes the impact of a recent recommendation made by Quebec's Comité consultatif de lutte contre la pauvreté et l'exclusion sociale to guarantee every individual an income equal to 80% of Statistics Canada's Market Basket Measure (MBM). Workers with earnings at least equivalent to...

Adopted on September 8 of 2000, the United Nations Millennium Declaration stated as its first goal that countries "…[further] resolve to halve, by the year 2015, the proportion of the world's people whose income is less than one dollar a day and the proportion of people who suffer from...

This paper investigates the impact of Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs on crime. Making use of a unique dataset combining detailed school characteristics with time and geo-referenced crime information from the city of São Paulo, Brazil, we estimate the contemporaneous effect of the...

At the European level and in most EU member states, higher employment levels are seen as key to better poverty outcomes. But what can we expect the actual impact to be? Up until now shift-share analysis has been used to estimate the impact of rising employment on relative income poverty. This...