This paper reviews the features of social assistance programs in Central and Eastern Europe in the mid 2000s along five dimensions, i.e. expenditure, entitlement rules, benefit levels, centralization of administration, and the provision of additional services. It finds that generally expenditure...

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 according to features related to centralisation is...

This paper makes two contributions to the literature. First, by employing a macro-level institutional dataset on benefit levels for social assistance (SA) and minimum income protection (MIP) in 22 European countries in the period 1990-2013, I show that the adequacy of income support for...

Social assistance programmes proliferated and expanded across much of the global South from the mid-1990s. Within Africa there has been enormous variation in this trend: some governments expanded coverage dramatically while others resisted this. The existing literature on social assistance, or...

The analysis of targeting of cash benefits is typically silent on whether any success is due to encouraging claims from the poor or to the decisions of administrators on the claims they receive. By contrast, the paper models the probabilities of households? knowledge of a new social assistance...

Are immigrants on welfare because they are more likely to be eligible or because they are more likely to claim benefits for which they are eligible? The answer is politically important, but because most current research on immigration and welfare is based on data from the U.S., the answer is...

Almost all OECD countries operate comprehensive minimum-income programmes for working-age individuals, either as last-resort safety nets alongside primary income replacement benefits, or as the principal instrument for delivering social protection. Such safety-net benefits aim primarily at...

The non take-up of social assistance benefits due to claim costs may seriously limit the anti-poverty effect of these programs. Yet, available evidence is fragmented and mostly relies on interview-based data, potentially biased by misreporting and measurement errors on both benefit entitlement...

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...

Our goal is to investigate the pathways that link welfare receipt across generations. We undertake a mediation analysis in which we not only calculate the intergenerational correlation in welfare, but also quantify the portion of that correlation that operates through key mechanisms. Our data...