Employment is key to combating poverty. Thus, detractors of social assistance programs argue that they create disincentives to work. While there is substantial evidence showing limited effects of these programs on overall labor supply, the jury is still out with respect to their impact on formal...

Microcredit program, originating in Bangladesh in the late 1970s, has played an important role to meet the financing needs of the impoverished communities around the world. While the successes and failures of microcredit in lifting the poor out of poverty have been recorded in a wide array of...

In this study, I use the timing and eligibility criteria of a large-scale conditional cash transfer program in Bolivian public schools to identify the efect of the program on adults’ labor supply. I find that adult females increase their labor supply due to the program, mostly through...

Most conceptualisations of the bottom billion assume that "the poor" are a minority group in a state of continuous dependency, identifiable by region and demographic. Using a flow analysis (inflow and outflow) of poverty, rather than a stock analysis, we explain why poverty is more appropriately...

The crisis revealed the need for a strategic review of the existing social protection system in Estonia. Extreme income fluctuations on one side and low social benefits on the other side exposed fragile groups in the population to a significant poverty risk. The government has recently...