Policies to promote privatisation in developing-country infrastructure gained momentum in the early 1990s as donors grew increasingly frustrated with efforts to strengthen public sector services that continued to fail. The strategy was intended to bring both finance and efficiency to ailing...

Basic services are essential to reducing poverty and improving quality of life. This working paper focuses on health, education, energy and water. These services contribute to achieving the Millennium Development Goals, as well as being goals in themselves. Over the past twenty years or so, the...

In the evaluation of conditional or unconditional cash transfer programmes, research that examines their effects on children?s and adolescents? school performance and participation in the labour market figures prominently. The programme effect is important because such programmes are designed...

This study analyses the impact of the conditional cash transfer programme, Programa Bolsa Família, on the occupational composition of the Brazilian labour market. The methodology relies on a discontinuity in the programme eligibility rule regarding children?s age to attain the identification of...

This text attempts to estimate the impacts of the Programa Bolsa Família on grade repetition, using matched data from the Single Registry (Cadastro Único, or CadÚnico), the Attendance Project and annual School Census. The authors use three approaches: i) comparing the results for poor...

Two waves of change? long-term climate change and immediate-term economic crises?are bringing the issue of food security into sharper relief? particularly in those Caribbean countries where food security is already volatile and faces a series of risks and challenges to the primary components of...

Namibia is classified as an upper middle-income country with an estimated Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita of USD6745 (constant 2000 exchange rate) in 2012 (IMF, 2013). Namibia has historically been one of the main recipients of official development assistance (ODA) in Africa, with an...

The Cadastro Único is the main registry for the purpose of programmes and policies directed at low-income populations in Brazil. It was formally created in 2001, in the context of the consolidation of four different cash transfer programmes: School Grants Programme (Programa Bolsa Escola),...

Global poverty and hunger are most prevalent where food is actually being produced?in rural areas. Roughly 70 per cent of the 1.4 billion extremely poor people in the world live in rural areas (IFAD, 2010). The increasing volatility in food prices, erratic effects of global climate change, and...

Expected Years of Schooling (EYS), one of the components of the education indicator in the Human Development Index (HDI) (UNDP, 2010), is a measure of the number of years of schooling a child at the start of his or her education is expected to receive, if current rates of enrolment are...