Because defined-contribution systems expose pensions to a number of risks, reforming governments have often strictly regulated the pension fund industry's structure, performance, and investments. This paper compares the rules in the new systems of Latin America and Eastern Europe with richer...

In many low income African countries, three factors are placing an undue burden on the elderly. First, the burden on the elderly has enormously increased with the increase in mortality of prime age adults due to HIV AIDS pandemic and regional conflicts. Second, the traditional safety net of the...

The authors propose alternative methods to project pension rights and implement them in Chile and Uruguay and partially in Argentina. The authors use incomplete work histories databases from the social security administrations to project entire lifetime work histories. The authors first fit...

The purpose of the paper is to review the structure and performance of the Czech pension system and examine alternative reform options. The paper shows that in the absence of reform the deficits of the Czech pension system may exceed 8 percent of GDP in 2050. To contain these deficits the paper...

Social investment funds are being used in a growing number of countries, to alleviate the impact of political, social, and economic crises, cushion the impact of adjustment programs, generate employment, and, finance small-scale investments in poor communities. The social funds operations...

This Youth Employment Inventory (YEI) is based on available documentation of current and past programs and includes evidence from 289 studies of interventions from 84 countries in all regions of the world. The interventions included in the YEI have been analyzed in order to (i) document the...

The authors present a new database of social security indicators for eleven Latin American countries designed to assess pension schemes in terms of the payments they promise in return to contributions. Based on this data, authors analyze inequality, insurance and incentives to work, using the...

Using country-level data, this report lays out the broad stylized facts regarding the relationship between child labor and per capita GDP, adult literacy, and the share of agriculture in the economy. The relationship between child labor force participation and per capita income is convex and...

This review summarizes the literature on disability and its relationship to pverty, including education, employment, income, and access to basic social services. Despite the dearth of formal analysis, it is clear that in developing countries, as in more developed areas, disabled people (and...

A new dataset of 1,948 retail stores in India shows that 27 percent of the stores find labor regulations as a problem for their business. Using these data, author analyzes the effect of labor regulations on employment at thestore level. The author foound that flexible labor regulations have a...