In India, over the years, the progress in women’s nutritional status has been less impressive and remains as a major problem for health policy. The dual burden of nutritional disorder of women in India is posing a serious challenge not only for nutritional policy but also for socio-economic...

The demographic database of Istat (www.istat.it)is explored and the main facts are extracted and described, both at the aggregate national level as well as at the regional one. This paper is completely self-standing but, at the same time, poses the basis for a more general analysis that will be...

Official poverty methodologies differ from other poverty measurement methods in the sense that the official ones are more often used as a benchmark to develop new policies as well as to evaluate the performance of existing programs. Europe has the tradition and the practice to use relative...

Living through hunger and physical hardship from infancy to premature old age; living through economic shifts that close factories and strip currency of its value in an instant; living through social turmoil, political upheaval, and war; through it all, poor men and women in communities around...

The aim of the study is to analyse the consequences of the changing structure of the labour market for the social security system. It will be shown that in the future the restructuring of the labour force will yield a main challenge for social policy and will have much bigger consequences for...

In this new version of the database we have included pilot social assistance programmes. A number of pilot cash transfer programmes have been introduced in Latin America, Asia and Africa in the last year or so, and a few more are in the design stage. Their scale and rationale suggest there is a...

Patterns of poor relief varied greatly amongst nineteenth century Irish cities. To date, however, there has been little examination of the reasons behind these divergences. One possible factor is the divergent occupational and demographic structures of these cities – ranging from the dramatic...

The paper proposes a method to speed up the transition toward the notional contributions pension system in Italy. It seems the most appropriate manner to combine and pursue employment and financial sustainability goals. The method computes percentages for abating the old retributive pensions...

In general, most countries of the former Eastern bloc have experienced poor growth performance and large increases in income inequality during the transition process. The most obvious success story in the process of transition to date has been Poland, which has outstripped other transition...

Poland undertook a rapid and decisive set of political and economic reforms starting in 1989-90, a period that has become known as the big bang. A widely held view is that, in all of the transition economies, the economic upheaval associated with the process of transition has led to substantial...