We study an innovative welfare program in Chile which 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 eligibility is a...

Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) are an endogenous innovation from Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) that aims to reduce current poverty while developing the human capital of the next generation, in the attempt to break the intergenerational transmission of poverty. Pioneered in Brazil and...

This paper compares for 13 Latin American countries the poverty and inequality impacts of cash transfer programs that are given to all children and the elderly (that is, categorical transfers), to programs of equal budget that are confined to the poor within each population group (that is,...

Following independence from the former Soviet Union, Tajikistan inherited an extensive social protection system that included a range of cash and noncash benefits. While the economy is well into its transition from a centrally planned to a market-oriented economy, its social welfare policies...

We study an innovative welfare program in Chile which 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 eligibility is a...

This paper provides an overview on the impacts of food aid. We consider its effects on consumption, nutrition, food markets and labour supply, as well as the extent to which it exacerbates or mitigates conflict. We also consider the comparative evidence on alternatives to food aid including...

Substantial cross-national differences in poverty alleviation are well documented, but theextent to which different parts of the social transfer system account for this variation is still relatively unexamined. This study analyses the redistributive effects of specific social policy institutions...

Trotz Hartz IV verbleiben in Deutschland zu viele potenzielle Arbeitnehmer in der Sozialhilfe, und eine nachhaltige Integration von Geringqualifizierten in sozialversicherungspflichtige Arbeitsplätze kommt nicht genügend voran. Der Earned Income Tax Credit in den USA ist dagegen ein Beispiel...

This study aims to compare the anti-poverty effectiveness of taxes and income transfers among western welfare states. It is shown that a country's poverty outcome can be decomposed into the level of market-generated poverty, the overall level of welfare efforts, and the poverty reduction...

A standard analysis of the anti-poverty effect of taxes and income transfers is to compare pre-tax-transfer poverty and post-tax-transfer poverty. A critical shortcoming of the standard approach is that it treats pre-tax-transfer poverty as given and ignores potential effects of taxes and...