This text discusses the Bolsa Família Program, its institutional design, implementation issues, its impacts and possibilities for future evolution. We discuss the institutional division of responsibilities, benefits, conditionalities and federative arrangements. With regards to implementation...

This text argues that the criteria used to define Bolsa Família benefits and the criteria used to establish coverage targets are inconsistent. While individual concession criteria are that beneficiaries should be paid for two years if they do not suffer large upward income mobility, the...

In 2006, the Bolsa Família Program completed its expansion, expecting to cover 11 million beneficiary families. The objective of this article is to evaluate whether this implied in deterioration in the program's efficient targeting and whether the target of 11 million families in fact covers...

Publicly provided education is both an important public expenditure and a relevant in-kind transfer, often to the poorest households. This paper compares three methods to value education services and their distributive impact. The methods are: i) The first method is cost of provision, according...

In this paper we analyze Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicílios Contínua (PNAD Contínua) microdata from 2012 to 2018 to document how the mid-decade economic recession reversed the trend of pro-poor growth that dated back to the early 2000s. Since the recession, there was a rise in...

The goal of the study is to evaluate the targeting of the Bolsa Família Programme and its impacts on the reduction of poverty and inequality. To that end, we have used data from the 2001-2015 standard National Household Sample Survey (Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicílios - PNAD) and...

Social protection policy in Brazil is a historically built patchwork of programs that pay different values to people in the same situation, leaves many unprotected (in particular, 17 million children), is fraught with duplications and other inefficiencies. This note proposes an approach within...

Welfare-to-work measures are a central theme of Israel’s labour and social policies to tackle relative poverty, which is concentrated among the Arab-Israeli and Ultra-orthodox (Haredi) communities. Policies include pilot programmes involving private-sector job placement (the “Wisconsin”...

Hungarian family policy focuses on providing generous options to take time off work to look after children. This system not only contributes to Hungary’s low employment rate but encourages long separation from the labour market, has largely failed to significantly influence fertility rates and...

Ensuring tax and transfer systems bring sufficient revenue to reach macroeconomic fiscal targets, address societal goals in re-distribution and social welfare, recognise the influence taxation has on businesses’ competitiveness and adequately address environmental externalities is a tough...