The growing economic fissures in the societies of Europe and Central Asia between generations, between insiders and outsiders in the labor market, between rural and urban communities, and between the super-rich and everyone else, are threatening the sustainability of the social contract. The...

Demography affects our daily lives. Consciously or not, we take into account the demographic context when making choices on employment, savings, health, and education. This report studies how demographic change is likely to affect demand for social services in Southern Africa and how today's...

Almost half the population remain poor, but the proportion has increased in rural areas and decreased in urban areas. Poverty stands at 48.6 percent nationally and almost 70 percent in rural areas; 21.3 percent are extreme poor, rising to 32.2 percent in rural areas5. The poverty rate hasn't...

Pakistan's social protection system is still in a nascent stage of development and so is the country's fiscal and institutional architecture for inter-governmental relations. In particular, the implicit devolution of social protection and related functions in the eighteenth constitutional...

Although Cambodia has become one of the world's leaders in poverty reduction, two-thirds of its population remains poor or economically vulnerable, with a large number of households moving in and out of poverty. Cambodian households are exposed to a range of shocks that can have devastating...

The government of Burkina Faso has a strong interest in strengthening its social safety nets provision to better support the country's poorest and most vulnerable households. It has demonstrated this commitment through past investments in social protection. Against a backdrop of limited public...

Fiscal policy is central to not only macroeconomic stability and growth, but also to poverty and inequality reduction. This paper provides the most comprehensive assessment of the distributional incidence of Turkey's fiscal policy to date. It analyzes the combined and individual incidence of...

When potential beneficiaries share their knowledge and attitudes about a policy intervention, their decision to participate and the effectiveness of both the policy and its evaluation may be influenced. This matters most notably in integrated social policies with several components. In this...