This Policy Note presents the potential poverty impacts of the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (Pantawid Pamilya) using simple analytical tools and the government's largest database of poor households to date, the National Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction (NHTS-PR). In doing...

Poverty estimates based on cross-section data provide static snapshots of poverty rates. Although a time series of cross-section data can offer some insights into poverty trends, it does not allow for an assessment of dynamics at the household level. Such a dynamic perspective on poverty...

Measurement of the middle class has recently come to the center of policy debate in middle-income countries as they search for the potential engines of growth and good governance. This debate assumes, first, that there is a meaningful definition of class, and second, that thresholds that define...

Despite their explicit focus on reaching the poor, many community driven development (CDD) projects have been found to be only mildly pro-poor in their funding allocations. This paper presents evidence of an explanation that has been overlooked in the CDD literature to date: the requirement that...

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...

This paper examines the dynamics of poverty and vulnerability in Haiti using various data sets. As living conditions survey data are not comparable in this country, we first propose to use the three rounds of the Demographic Health Survey (DHS) available before the earthquake. Decomposing...

The objective of the paper is to update the small area estimates of poverty and inequality for rural Vietnam. The new estimates of province and district level poverty for the year 2006, when combined with estimates available for 1999, allow for examination of how poverty has changed in rural...

A wide range of public policies aims at improving the social welfare of the population or specific groups among the population. The use of the term social protection usually refers to the group of social policies that provide cash transfer to protect households from poverty. The goal of this...

This paper contributes to the long-standing debate on the merits of decentralized beneficiary targeting in the administration of development programs, focusing on the large-scale Malawi Farm Input Subsidy Program. Nationally-representative household survey data are used to systematically analyze...

Using a simple framework, this paper discusses the underlying reason of the variation of threshold level in developed countries, from the least generous 20 percent to around 60 percent of median wage, with an average of 35 percent. The generosity of minimum guarantee social assistance programs...