We provide evidence of the relative cost-effectiveness of different types of policy instrument in reducing poverty or limiting its increase, comparing within and between seven diverse EU countries. We do that by measuring the implications of increasing/reducing the instrument size within its...

This paper considers the case for universal child allowances in Ghana. It follows findings from an earlier study of 14 middle income countries that examined optimal approaches to reduce child poverty using universal categorical child allowances. The paper describes the demographic profiles that...

Governments in new democracies launch social policies with the purported goal of alleviating the effects of poverty among the most vulnerable households, usually low income families with children. However, this goal is can be thwarted by the clientelistic distribution of social policies'...

This paper uses data from 14 Middle Income Countries in the Luxembourg Income Study database to examine the position of children in the income distributions, and to calculate child poverty prevalence, to assess how far children receive transfers from state social protection systems compared to...

Housing prices are rising faster than incomes in many areas of the world, reducing wellbeing and engendering social discontent. Passivity by municipal and national governments is no longer an option. In this essay, I will describe the tradeoffs between different housing policy objectives of...

This article presents an analytical overview and defines the essence of the concept “social policy” in the context of its relation to the economy. The author of the article has developed a system of indicators to measure the impact of social policy and proposed a technique for assessing its...

The main objectives of social assistance benefits, including poverty alleviation and labor-market or social reintegration, can be seriously compromised if support is difficult to access. While recent studies point to high non-take-up rates, existing evidence does not make full use of the...

This paper analyses the distributive impacts of various regulatory and institutional settings of European schemes of social assistance. For this purpose, two sets of classifications of European schemes of social assistance are introduced that classify the systems according to regulatory...

In this paper, the relationship between the degree of centralisation and the distributive outcomes in European schemes of social assistance is investigated. For this purpose, a scheme of classification suitable for grouping the EU15 schemes except for Luxembourg according to features related to...

In a slow process marked by authoritarian moments, regressive effects, bureaucratic insulation, centralized arrangements and cronyism, since the 1930s Brazil has been building its Welfare State. In the wake of struggles and political clashes for ensuring rights and reviving democracy, the...