This paper examines land tenure in informal urban settlements in India from a gender perspective through field research conducted in Ahmedabad in collaboration with the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA). The author describes the formal and informal tenure arrangements that were in place...

We assess how one of the largest public works programmes in the world-Ethiopia's Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP)-affected violent conflict and civil unrest. Using difference-in-differences methods and linking administrative and geocoded conflict event data, we find that the PSNP did not...

This working paper examines the prevalence of humanitarian crises in Tanzania, their role in perpetuating poverty cycles, and how poverty graduation programmes mitigate these effects by building the resilience of ultra-poor households. We utilize a mixed-methods approach, comprising desk...

This study investigates the contribution of Mozambique's flagship social pension programme, the Programa de Subsídio Social Básico, to building resilience against shocks. Applying a fuzzy regression discontinuity approach to bespoke survey data, we separate direct effects of programme...

The paper reviews the steady and widespread decline in income inequality which has taken place in most of Latin America over 2002-10 and which - if continued for another 2-3 years - would reduce the average regional income inequality to pre-liberalization levels. The paper then focuses on the...

This paper investigates the impact of social transfer programmes on school enrolment and child labour in Malawi utilizing a micro-simulation evaluation method. Four hypothetical cash transfer programmes, differentiated in terms of their conditions on children's enrolment and gender, are...

This study presents an analysis of the electoral impacts of one of the most prominent conditional cash transfers in the world: Mexico's Progresa-Oportunidades-Prospera (POP) programme. Using population censuses, and POP's administrative records and elections data, we exploit the targeting...

Social assistance programmes proliferated and expanded across much of the global South from the mid-1990s. Within Africa there has been enormous variation in this trend: some governments expanded coverage dramatically while others resisted this. The existing literature on social assistance, or...

We examine the evolution of educational assistance in Indonesia, following two decades of government decentralization, and its effect on education quality. Using Indonesia Family Life Survey data, we exploit as exogenous rule the variation in the implementation of government decentralization to...

This paper considers the case for universal child allowances in Ghana. It follows findings from an earlier study of 14 middle income countries that examined optimal approaches to reduce child poverty using universal categorical child allowances. The paper describes the demographic profiles that...