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...

Providing old-age social protection for women is a major policy challenge, as women?s working lives tend to be more diverse than men?s, often including periods of care-giving and part-time work. In addition, workers in the informal sector, where the majority of women work, are excluded from...

Evidence suggests that insufficient household income can lead to labour supplementation by children and adolescents. The pressure on them to enter the labour market results in less time available for school activities and, ultimately, in school drop-out. Thus most impact evaluations of...

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) estimated that the world would need to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 50?60 per cent from 1990 levels by 2050, with a future downward trajectory that is even more drastic, to have a probable chance of limiting a global temperature...