Workers have the right to take up any job offer in their country of citizenship but not to rent out that right. This paper shows that relaxing this restriction using a two-sided competitive market in work permits can provide a basic income guarantee for workers in migration-destination...

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...

Climate change and climate policies will affect poverty reduction efforts through direct and immediate impacts on the poor and by affecting factors that condition poverty reduction, such as economic growth. This paper explores this relation between climate change and policies and poverty...

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 evaluates how the Philippines utilize social protection systems and programs to help households better manage disaster risk. Exposure and vulnerability to natural disasters and the effects of climate change are particularly high in the Philippines. At the same time, the Philippines...

Climate risk is an important driver of long-term poverty dynamics, especially in rural regions. This paper builds a dynamic, multi-generation household model of consumption, accumulation, and risk management to draw out the full consequences of exposure to climate risk. The model incorporates...

Safety nets in Africa are a popular policy instrument to address the widespread chronic poverty and encourage human capital investments in the education and health of children. Although there have been considerable analyses on the impacts of safety nets globally, particularly in Latin America,...

The authors assess the impact of Argentina's main social policy response to the severe economic crisis of 2002. The program aimed to provide direct income support for families with dependents, for whom the head had become unemployed due to the crisis. Counterfactual comparisons are based on a...