The Sudanese population has suffered from years of conflict, and deep-seated security issues have severely hampered Sudan’s long-term economic stability and social development. As a consequence, Sudan is struggling to meet its MDGs. Since the secessionof South Sudan, Sudan has lost a...

The report lays out options to use social safety nets to meet the goal set by the Government of Botswana to eradicate extreme poverty by 2016 and in a budget neutral way. Introducing a Family Support Grant is argued to be a more efficient way to address absolute poverty by offering a family...

Human trafficking, as it is defined by international law, subsumes all forms of nonconsensual exploitation. That is, whenever people are forced or lured into exploitation no matter if movement of victims is involved it is considered human trafficking. There is, though, a large overlap with...

This report provides an overview of the provision of social protection to refugees and asylum seekers from Sub-Saharan Africa in the Southern African Development Community (SADC). This includes analyzing the legal framework and levels of implementation, as well as proposing policy directions on...

The objective of this policy note is to assist the Chinese government in assessing implementation of the unemployment insurance (UI) program to date, identifying key challenges, and exploring possible policy responses. The note begins with a background section on recent developments in the...

There is a wide agreement on the fact that a large informal economy leaves many individuals without social protection and reduces government's tax revenue and social security contributions. However, it remains an open question what really drives informality, namely whether workers are simply...

In this paper the authors survey the World Bank poverty assessment literature to date on the relationship between disability and poverty.The authors find that using standard assumptions about the distribution of household consumption among household members and the typical way that poverty lines...

A number of trends are changing the nature of social risks and increase the importance of human capital, adaptability and flexibility. This paper discusses the usefulness of a life-course perspective in developing proactive social policies that better fit the changing life cycles of individuals...

The paper identifies key labor market and institutional differences between developed and developing countries, analyzes how these differences affect the working of the standard, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)-style unemployment insurance (UI) program, and derives...

Although resilience has become a popular concept in studies of poverty and vulnerability, it has been difficult to obtain a credible measure of resilience. This difficulty is because the data required to measure resilience, which involves observing household outcomes over time after every...