This paper quantifies the magnitude of transitions across occupational categories in Colombia, a country with high unemployment and informality but quickly increasing its social security coverage in healthcare. The analysis makes use of a panel of households between 2008 and 2009 and...

This study analyzes opportunities for children in Cote d'Ivoire, where opportunities refer to access to basic services and goods that improve the likelihood of a child maximizing his or her human potential. The principle that guides this analysis is one of equality of opportunity, which is that...

This paper analyzes the distributional effect of public spending in Zambia using the most recent data from the 2010 Living Conditions Monitoring Survey. The analysis focuses on both the"traditional"social sectors, such as education and public healthcare, as well as other spending areas less...

This paper brings back the fiscal angle to the analysis of equal opportunities both by connecting traditional benefit-incidence analysis of public spending with equal opportunities and by conducting ex-ante micro-simulations on the fiscal cost of equal opportunity policies in education. Four...

A simple cost-benefit analysis is used to estimate substantive social benefits associated with a universal music training programme in Venezuela (B/C ratio of 1.68). Those social benefits accrue from both reduced school dropouts and declining community victimization. Biases affecting these...

This paper reviews the prospects for long-term food security in Asia, where a significant number of malnourished individuals still live after decades of mixed progress. Evidence shows that poverty reduction on its own will not do the job of eradicating hunger, nor will only increased food...