The immediate welfare costs of an economywide crisis can be high, but are there also lasting impacts? And are they greater in some geographic areas than others? The authors study Indonesia s severe financial crisis of 1998. They use 10 national surveys spanning 1993 2002, each covering 200,000...

A well-designed public safety net can provide aid to the poor in times of need. Two basic principles should guide safety net policies: 1) Safety nets should efficiently insure the poor; to do so they must respond flexibly to the needs of the poor. 2) Safety nets should be an intrinsic part of...

This case study for India finds an explanation for the drop in average household consumption in rural areas occurring in the year after the 1991 stabilization program instigated to deal with a macroeconomic crisis. A number of factors contributed to falling average living standards, including...

August 1999 - To minimize the harmful impact on poor people of macroeconomic shocks, sound policies for dealing with crises - and an adequate public safety net - should be in place before a crisis starts. Many developing countries faced macroeconomic shocks in the 1980s and 1990s. The impact of...