Social protection systems in Latin America have been transformed in the past two decades. Until the 1980s, those who were not covered by the social security arrangements available primarily in the urban formal sector received little public assistance beyond universal subsidies for some food or...

The paper provides an up-to date and selective review of the literature on how social safety nets contribute to growth. The evidence is carefully chosen to show how safety nets have the potential to overcome constraints on growth linked to market failures, and is organized into 4 distinct...

In a world with volatile food prices, countries have an incentive to shelter their populations from induced real income shocks. When some agents are net food producers while others are net consumers, there is scope for insurance between the two groups. A domestic social protection scheme would...

Social protection is absent from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and only recently has gained some prominence in the post-2015 discourse. In the past quarter century, however, rising inequality has often accompanied economic growth. At the same time, the growing importance of risk and...

This paper examines whether the Colombian government's expansion of social programs in the early 1990s, particularly the publicly provided health insurance, discouraged formal employment. Using household survey data and variation across municipalities in the onset of interviews for the SISBEN,...

This paper first reviews the history of social insurance policy and coverage in urban China, documenting the evolution in the coverage of pensions and medical and unemployment insurance for both local residents and migrants, and highlighting obstacles to expanding coverage. The paper then uses...

The authors analyze lawsuits involving publicly-appointed lawyers in a labor court in Mexico to study how a rigid law is enforced. They show that, even after a judge has awarded something to a worker alleging unjust dismissal, the award goes uncollected 56 percent of the time. Workers who are...

This paper provides a review of the design and experience of risk-based pension fund supervision in several countries that have been leaders in the development of these methods. The utilization of risk-based methods originates primarily in the supervision of banks. In recent years it has...

The social and economic consequences of poor mental health in the developing world are presumed to be significant, yet are largely under-researched. The authors argue that mental health modules can be meaningfully added to multi-purpose household surveys in developing countries, and used to...

A newly created dataset including 239 decisions made by the Mexican Federal Competition Commission on horizontal mergers between 1997 and 2001 is used to estimate the different factors affecting the Commission's resolution. The paper approximates the decision making process using two different...