Poor persons in poor countries are greatly exposed to the risk of adverse shocks, many of international origin, which can create long-lasting damage to individual well-being. There is a strong moral and prudential case for taking measures which reduce the extent to which such shocks arise and...

Government income and housing interventions during the COVID pandemic had demonstrable benefits in reducing the growth of homelessness. Comparisons of projected versus actual growth in Los Angeles County from 2020 to 2022 validate the benefit of these interventions.This report offers three types...

This volume describes mechanisms to build social protection floors, such as a national dialogue in Myanmar, reaching rural dwellers in South Africa, worker facilitation centres in India, single window services in Mongolia, legal systems in Brazil and South Africa, labour inspection in China,...

Until recently, the literature on income inequality within countries suggested that trends in this area had remained stable over the last few decades, and that there is no relation between changes in inequality on the one side and domestic and external liberalization on the other. Against this...

This paper asks whether the policies and programmes enacted to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the UK will compete with other goals of public policy, in particular social policy goals. The Climate Change Act 2008 has set the UK some of the most demanding targets in the world: to reduce GHG...

Using the first release of the three-wave, four-year General Social Survey panel dataset, we track changes in attitudes towards redistribution and government from 2006 to 2010 to find that decreases in demand for redistribution are associated with decreases in confidence in government after the...

Redistribution across individuals in a one-year-period framework is an empirically intensely studied question. However, a substantial share of annual redistribution might turn out to serve individual insurance in a longer perspective. In particular, public pensions, that smooth incomes over the...

The federal government's welfare reform efforts have two defining characteristics: first, welfare reform requires welfare recipients to work for their checks (and to move toward permanent, self-sustainable employment); and second welfare reform devolves administrative responsibility to the...

Redistribution across individuals in a one-year-period framework is an empirically intensely studied question. However, a substantial share of annual redistribution might turn out to serve individual insurance in a longer perspective, reducing the level of actual redistribution across...