This paper studies an innovative welfare program in Chile that combines a period of frequent home visits to households in extreme poverty, with guaranteed access to social services. Program impacts are identified using a regression discontinuity design, exploring the fact that program...

Urban heating demand in Liaoning has grown rapidly, due to rising incomes, housing sector growth, and privatization of housing. During the past decade, demand increased at an annual growth rate of 14 percent. Heating supply has been unable to keep pace with this surging demand. Small coal-fired...

Several East Asian countries, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, are considering an expansion of their social safety net programs. In many cases, existing delivery mechanisms for social assistance in the region tend to be basic, in line with the small size of programs. In a context...

Social Safety Nets (SSN) are defined as non?contributory transfer programs targeted to the poor or those vulnerable to poverty and shocks. About half of World Bank social protection projects in the reviewed cohort are SSN. They are mostly non-emergency investment operations with a higher...

In response to a request from the Government of Egypt, the World Bank undertook the analysis of selected sectoral issues in education and health. The objective of the analytical task was to inform policies to enhance human development impact of social sector expenditures in line with Egypt's new...