This paper proposes a new Green Government IT index to assess the environmentally responsible use of computers and other resources by the information technology departments of government institutions and nonprofit organizations. The methodology used in the paper relies on the established...

This paper constructs cost-of-living indexes for different groups of households to quantify the differences in the distribution of the burden of high inflation among the populations of countries in Europe and Central Asia. The analysis demonstrates that the cost-of-living crisis of 2022-23 has...

This paper uses a newly assembled data set on various types of social protection spending in 154 countries during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 to analyze the effect of the electoral cycle on the size and composition of the social protection stimulus budget. The analysis shows that the...

The claim that social protection is a luxury good - with a national income elasticity exceeding unity - has been influential. The paper tests the “luxury good hypothesis" using newly-assembled data on social protection spending across countries since 1995, treating the pandemic period...

This paper examines the effectiveness of income protection and job protection policies for the post-pandemic economic recovery of the second half of 2020 through 2021. The paper is based on a new data set of the budgets of social protection programs implemented as a part of the pandemic stimulus...