This study examines if household access to microfinance reduces poverty in Pakistan, and if so, to what extent and across which dimensions of well-being by taking account of the multi-dimensional aspect of poverty. The study draws on first-hand observations and empirical data gathered through...

In this paper, the relationship between the degree of centralisation and the distributive outcomes in European schemes of social assistance is investigated. For this purpose, a scheme of classification suitable for grouping the EU15 schemes according to features related to centralisation is...

Targeting based on individuals or households needs instead of applying universal programs helps distribute scarce resources to those who need it most, avoiding “leakage” of the poverty budget to non-poor households. In this paper, the authors explore the use of different household and...

The global food price shock of 2006-2008 has particularly affected poorer strata of populations in several developing countries. In Egypt and some other countries it has put food subsidy schemes to the test. This paper develops two comparable computable general equilibrium models for Egypt and...

In view of rising wage and income inequality, the introduction of a legal minimum wage has recently become an important policy issue in Germany. We analyze the distributional effects of a nationwide legal minimum wage of 7.50 € per hour on the basis of a microsimulation model which accounts...

This paper assesses the impact of social assistance benefits on household welfare in Moldova. Ignoring standard issues of impact evaluations such as selection bias, behavioral responses, unobserved heterogeneity and endogeneity, an incidence analysis suggests that increased spending on social...

Budget deficit, exchange rate fluctuation and high fuel world price provides a pressure on budget capacity to stimulate the Indonesian economy. The government has designed several fiscal policies, including reducing the fuel subsidy. The study objective is to analyse the impact of reducing fuel...

This paper aims to contribute to the shared goal of assessing the distributional consequences of macroeconomic shocks and policies. It does so by looking into the domain of applicability of the different microsimulation approaches used at present in combination with macroeconomic CGE models. In...

This paper analyses the distributive impacts of various regulatory and institutional settings of European schemes of social assistance. For this purpose, two sets of classifications of European schemes of social assistance are introduced that classify the systems according to regulatory...