This paper focuses on the experience of the transition countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, in providing adequate safety nets for the poor during the last ten years. The paper discusses the problem of poverty, and vulnerability, and looks at the typical types of interventions offered by...

How can the income support for the unemployed Filipino workers be improved? The study analyzes both arguments in favor of, and against each of the following programs: unemployment insurance, unemployment assistance, severance pay, unemployment insurance savings accounts, public works, and...

This report focuses on changes in the social protection system to lessen the social impact of the economic crisis that confronts the Russian Federation today. The report is not comprehensive and covers exclusively the crisis-related issues. It addresses the key challenges of 1) coping with...

This paper interprets case studies, and theory on community involvement in beneficiary selection, and benefit delivery for social safety nets. Several considerations should be carefully balanced in assessing the advantages of using community groups as targeting agents. First, benefits from...

An effective public safety net can be important in a poor transition economy such as Vietnam. Yet we know very little about the performance of existing public transfers as a safety net. Using panel data, the paper investigates whether Vietnam's main social welfare transfers promoted poor people...

Using panel data from a three-year study of 727 households, the authors identify the sources of income inequality in rural Pakistan. First, theydecompose total rural income among five sources: agricultural, livestock, rental, nonfarm, and transfer income. This decomposition shows that...

National antipoverty programs often rely heavily on provincial governments. The center targets poor provinces in the hope that they will reach their own poor. Without successful intraprovincial targeting, however, even dramatic redistribution from rich to poor provinces can have little impact on...

Economists often advise governments to target their spending better when cuts are called for. The author asks whether that advice is consistent with a political economy constraint that limits the welfare losses to the nonpoor from spending cuts. A simple theoretical model shows that the answer...

While it is improbable that households with different incomes are equally likely to participate in sample surveys, the lack of data for nonrespondents has hindered efforts to correct for the bias in measures of poverty and inequality. The authors demonstrate how the latent income effect on...

The authors develop a microeconometric method to account for differences across distributions of household income. Going beyond the determination of earnings in labor markets, they also estimate statistical models for occupational choice and for conditional distributions of education, fertility,...