This paper analyses the effectiveness of tax-benefit systems in reducing poverty and inequality across 13 countries in the Global South. Using national survey data and tax-benefit microsimulation models from the SOUTHMOD project, we provide a cross-country perspective on the redistributive...

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 paper presents an analysis of the recent evolution of social assistance in the developing world, looking at its complex typological configuration, which has interlinked with, and partly reflects the complex demographic and epidemiological transitions and rapid urbanization and economic...

This paper studies how household-level receipts of cash transfers affect political attitudes in Pakistan. The paper exploits the locally exogenous eligibility cut-off of the flagship Benazir Income Support Programme to estimate causal effects. The main results show evidence of improved...

This paper assesses the effects on poverty and inequality of the alternative targeting approaches that Zambia's Social Cash Transfer programme could take as its expansion continues during the period of the country's Seventh National Development Plan (2017-21). It further assesses the domestic...

Literature on social protection in Kenya shows progress in implementation of cash transfers but not the social health insurance scheme. With a dearth of explanation for this contrasting promotion of social protection, this paper examines the role of Kenya's political settlement and the interests...

In 2015 the Government of Uganda agreed to start rolling out a social pension programme, and increasing its own contribution to it. This was driven by the highly politicized efforts of a transnational policy coalition, led by international donors and national bureaucrats. It was a struggle over...

This paper examines the political economy of Rwanda's Vision 2020 Umurenge Programme, concluding that strong government commitment to the programme has been shaped by the specific characteristics of the political settlement that was established around 2000. For the Rwandan government, the...

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...

A well functioning system of public service delivery requires the definition and measurement of eligibility for services to be determined in a transparent and non-discretionary manner. This paper uses the case of the Productive Social Safety Net in mainland Tanzania to explore factors that...