The federal benefit rate (FBR) of the Supplemental Security Income program provides an inflation-indexed income guarantee for aged and disabled people with low assets. Some consider the FBR an attractive measure of Social Security benefit adequacy. Others propose the FBR as an administratively...

Over the last decade, many of the Western welfare states have found themselves under pressure to reform due to both exogenous factors, such as globalization and the ageing of society, and endogenous factors, such as a shift in focus from welfare to workfare. An important aspect of these reforms...

This article posits the issue of American poverty and governments' inability to significantly alter this adverse social condition. While data suggests there has been a substantial and measurable improvement in poverty rates over the past four decades, the fact remains, poverty is an inherent and...

The welfare state is undergoing profound changes. In most Western countries private elements are introduced in formerly public welfare systems. These processes of privatisation mark the transformation from the conventional welfare state, in which the government fulfils the role of a public...

There is ample evidence that utility subsidies imbedded in inverted block and other tariff structures are not well targeted to the poor, simply because the poor tend to have much lower access rates to water and electricity networks than richer households. This paper provides an analysis of the...

The study tries to answer the following questions: Will exposure to world agricultural prices generate more poverty or less? To what extent will households be affected by changes in agricultural trade polices? Do multilateral agricultural liberalization matter more than bilateral changes?...

Strong opinions about the impact of globalization on poverty are not always backed by robust factual evidence. As argued in this paper, however, it is not all that easy to lay our hands on robust facts. Quantitative analyses of trade liberalization appear highly sensitive to basic modelling and...

In September 1993, the World Bank created the Inspection Panel. At the time, it was hailed as an unprecedented effort to increase the Bank's accountability. Prior to the establishment of the Panel, the Bank had engaged in a number of projects that devastated local populations and caused...

This paper examines the effects of public provision of private goods (i.e., non-social government subsidies) to the detriment of government provision of public goods and social subsidies on two key measures of the quality of economic growth: poverty rates and income inequality. We use a new data...

Financial poverty indicators still play an important role in policymaking and evaluation. Countries such as the USA and the EU member states use one or several 'official' poverty indicators on which success of poverty reduction policy is regularly monitored. Whereas the US poverty indicator is...