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...

Tajikistan was one of the fastest growing countries in the Europe and Central Asia region during the last decade. The economic growth was widely shared by the population and as a result poverty (measured by the national poverty line) declined from 73 percent in 2003 to 47 percent in 2009...

The importance of gender equality is reflected not only in the Millennium Development Goals, but also in the World Bank's Gender Action Plan launched in 2007 as well as in other treaties and actions undertaken at regional and international levels. Unlike other work on gender and poverty, which...

According to global spatial data sets in 2000 more than one-third of the rural population in developing countries was located on less favored agricultural land and areas. Less favored agricultural lands are susceptible to low productivity and degradation, because their agricultural potential is...

Madagascar is one of the poorest countries in the world and a very high proportion of the population experiences frequent shocks, whether from natural disasters, economic shocks or internal crises of governance. As a consequence, about half the country’s population is undernourished. Children...

In this paper, a unique post-earthquake survey designed to provide a rapid assessment of food insecurity in Haiti is used in order to see how adequately emergency assistance programs have been allocated. When modelling the impact of various covariates upon assistance allocation, the location of...

Social policy in Mexico has focused on identifying and supporting chronically poor households. Yet, Mexico has a significant number of households that are just above the poverty line who are not eligible, by definition, for antipoverty programs and are at risk of falling back into poverty in the...

This study estimates marginal increase in malnutrition for children ages 1-3 years from exposure to an extreme shock in the West African Sahel. The study uses knowledge of a child's birth and high resolution spatial and temporal distribution of shocks, calculated from the Normalized Difference...

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...

Alleviating poverty for the elderly requires a different approach from other age groups, and a minimum pension is likely to be the only viable option. This paper examines the impact on old age poverty and the fiscal cost of universal minimum old age pensions in 18 Latin American countries using...