The Covid-19 pandemic has brought about massive declines in wellbeing around the world. This paper seeks to quantify and compare two important components of those losses - increased mortality and higher poverty - using years of human life as a common metric. We estimate that almost 20 million...

The novel Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), which has become a global epidemic, hit Ghana on 12 March 2020 and, in less than a week, increased by over 300% with two deaths. As of 11 August 2020, Ghana had recorded over 41,000 cases with over 215 deaths. This study seeks to provide a...

We investigate how material well-being has changed over time for single mother headed families—the primary group affected by welfare reform and other policy changes of the 1990s. We focus on consumption as well as other indicators including components of consumption, measures of housing...

This document offers estimates of the possible changes in the social structure of the countries of Latin America derived from the consequent economic contraction from the Covid-19 pandemic and explores the possible costs and benefits of different types of interventions to cushion its impact. The...

Most fiscal incidence studies neither analyze simultaneously the tax and benefit incidence (simply known as net fiscal incidence) nor actually relate poverty indices to fiscal impact. This paper jointly and separately examines the redistributive and poverty effects of the tax and transfer...

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...

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...

Uncertainty and unpredictability faced by low-income households increase their vulnerability making poverty even more unbearable. India¡¦s National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD)-initiated Self-Help Group (SHG) program, which is currently the largest and fastest growing...

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...

In most OECD countries the gap between rich and poor has widened over the past decades. This paper analyzes whether and to what extent taxes and social transfers have contributed to this trend. Has the redistributive power of different social programs changed over time? The paper contributes to...