This report describes Namibia's social safety net and issues and options for reform. In Namibia, the extended family is a big shock absorber: informal sharing arrangements between and within households are Namibia's unique sources of strength. Grandparents contribute enormously to the...

How does Vietnam's public safety net affect outcomes for the poor? Although social welfare programs in Vietnam are centrally mandated, they are locally implemented according to local norms and local poverty standards and often rely heavily on local financing. The author examines the coverage,...

The author analyzes how the incidence of household endowments and the allocation of social benefits affect families'transitions into and out of poverty. Using panel data for 1993-96 from Poland's Household Budget Survey, and a framework based on sample survival analysis techniques, the author...

The authors compare poverty in three Eastern European countries (Bulgaria, Hungary, and Poland) with poverty in three countries of the former Soviet Union (Estonia, Kyrgyz Republic, and Russia). They find striking differences between the post-Soviet and Eastern European experiences with poverty...

The state of Bahia, Brazil has made progress in reducing poverty and improving social indicators in the past decade. Despite this progress, Bahia's poverty is among the highest and its social indicators are among the lowest in Brazil. Currently, 41 percent of Bahia's population live in...

After a decade of slow economic growth Egypt's rate of growth recovered in the late 1990s, averaging more than five percent a year. But the effect of this growth on poverty patterns has not been systematically examined using consistent, comparable household datasets. In this paper, the authors...

Most empirical work on how growth affects poverty and inequality has been based on international panel data sets. Panels can also be used within a country, if the analysis is carried out at the regional level. The author does this for Bangladesh, where regional panel estimates indicate that...

The authors examine how the food stamp program affected measures of poverty during devaluation of the Jamaican dollar in the early 1990s. They find that without the food stamp program, the poverty gap in Jamaica would have been much worse, especially in 1990 and 1991. For the country as a whole,...

The authors use 20 household surveys for India's 15 major states, spanning 1960-94, to study how initial conditions and the sectoral composition of economic growth interact to influence how much economic growth reduced poverty. The elasticities of measured poverty to farm yields and development...

Since January 1990, Poland's social safety net has changed greatly. Unemployment benefits were introduced, for example, because of escalating unemployment (about 15 percent of the labor force at the end of 1993). The cost of the social safety net has risen sharply since the transition began,...