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...

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...

Difficult economic times began for Namibia in 2008 as real economic growth suddenly dropped to 4.3 per cent from the 5.5 per cent recorded in 2007. There were also wide fluctuations in the general level of prices of goods and services, including food commodities. Cost-of-living inflation rose to...

The trade-off between targeting and coverage has always been something of a quandary for progressive cash transfers, particularly those that are not entitlements. Undue inclusion errors mean that families or individuals whose need is not so great are being paid at the expense of either taxpayers...

One of the principal challenges in sustainable development, especially in developing countries, is to build institutions that generate positive environmental and social externalities by helping individuals to perceive a positive relationship between self-interest and ?the common good?....

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...

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...