This paper looks at the experiences of various Asian countries in expanding the coverage of the pension system to informal sector workers. The paper argues that given aging and growing informality, a rapid forward-looking response from governments in the region is necessary to provide protection...

This is a review of research on child labor in Sub-Saharan Africa. It focuses on child labor taking place in the household, and controlled by relatives of the children, since this is the most extensive form of child labor in African countries. It is also the form of child labor that is the most...

The paper argues that the current statistics on child labor (generally based on economically active children), are not a workable proxy for data on child labor, generating numbers of child laborers, and their gender composition, that do not represent the groups described by the international...

Thispaper provides empirical evidence on the joint determinants of child labor, and child schooling, using individual level data from Egypt. The main findings are as follows: 1) A ten percent increase in the illiterate male market wage decreases the probability of child labor by 21.5 percent for...

While targeting can effectively channel resources to the poor, implementation details matter tremendously to distributive outcomes. Several key factors affect performance, including: data collection processes; information management; household assessment mechanisms; institutional arrangements;...

The WorldBank's conceptual framework to assess pension systems and reform options evaluates initial conditions and the capacity to improve the enabling environment, and then focuses on how best to work within these to achieve the core objectives of pension systems - protection against the risk...

In response to shortages in public budgets for government health services, many developing countries around the world, have adopted formal, or informal systems of user fees for health care. In most countries, user fee proceeds seldom represent more than 15 percent of total costs in hospitals,...

The authors discover from an analysis of monthly employment surveys in Brazil's six largest cities over the last twenty years that employed children frequently stop work then start working again, a phenomenon dubbed"intermittent employment."This is not surprising, because the previous chapter on...

A legacy of the command economy in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union is a social protection system that emphasizes institutional care for vulnerable individuals. It has been well established that in many cases institutionalization can be more expensive per client served and...

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...