Social pensions are expanding in rapidly ageing Asia as a means to protect older persons from poverty and social exclusion. Although social pensions are widely viewed as useful instruments to reduce old-age poverty and to include those traditionally excluded from contributory pension insurance,...

The real-time opportunities for sustainable inclusive green growth within the Southern African Development Community (SADC) are being explored as part of the development of a Green Guide for SADC parliamentarians. The collaborative partnership between the Rural and Sustainable Development team...

In 2006, the Government of Malawi initiated the Social Cash Transfer (SCT) programme as part of a poverty reduction strategy that targeted ultra-poor, labour-constrained households. The SCT programme is an unconditional cash transfer designed to reduce poverty, hunger and starvation, and improve...

Social protection has proven its ability to provide an effective toolkit for addressing vulnerability and poverty, and has made significant contributions to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in many countries. But much work remains to be done, particularly in terms of...

The concept of inclusive growth plays an increasingly prominent role in steering the development debate in international policy circles. Yet the initial intrinsic obviousness of the concept proves fallacious when one embarks on operationally ddefining ?inclusiveness? and its consequences in...

Two trends had been clear in recent years: ?the anti-inflationary target moved the employment objective to a secondary position? and, with regards to the instruments, ?monetary policy was established as the macroeconomic policy par excellence? (Frenkel, 2006). This focus was questioned in the...

The debate about the relationship between income and life events such as mortality and fertility has been ongoing for over 200 years. It remains a recurring topic of modern debate. In the last decade of the18th century, the Marquis de Condorcet, in France, and William Godwin, in England,...

A Goldman Sachs study (2008) estimates that between 60 and 80 million people are introduced to the consumer market of durable goods annually, forming a kind of new worldwide middle class. The environmental impacts of these new consumers are not insignificant, and motivate important international...

Agroecological methods of agricultural production have been shown to be an ecologically sustainable and socially and economically viable way to support national food systems (Altieri and Toledo, 2011; IAASTD, 2008). When the prices of key staple crops more than doubled during the 2008 food crisis,...

The Programa Bolsa Família (PBF) has brought about two important developments for the Brazilian social protection system: 1) it has merged similar programmes, which operated separately, thus eliminating gaps, overlaps and inefficiencies; and 2) it gave that system a new dimension by expanding...