This paper presents an analysis of the recent evolution of social assistance in the developing world, looking at its complex typological configuration, which has interlinked with, and partly reflects the complex demographic and epidemiological transitions and rapid urbanization and economic...

This paper reviews the evidence on the effectiveness of active labour market programmes in low- and middle-income countries with high informality, highlighting examples of interventions that have been implemented in combination with other policies including social protection measures. In...

Economic growth in Vietnam has been fairly resilient to the global commodity and financial crises, but it is unclear why. In addition, the impact of the crises on employment and poverty is in dispute. We develop a dynamic computable general equilibrium model to decompose impacts and estimate...

Controversy over the aggregate impact of foreign aid has focused on reduced form estimates of the aid-growth link. The causal chain, through which aid affects developmental outcomes including growth, has received much less attention. We address this gap by: (i) specifying a structural model of...

The notion that foreign aid harms the institutions of recipient governments remains prevalent. We combine new disaggregated aid data and various metrics of political institutions to re-examine this relationship. Long-run cross-section and alternative dynamic panel estimators show a small...