One Pager No. 219 ? Nepal?s Senior Citizens? Allowance: A Model of Universalism in a Low-income Country Context By Michael Samson, Economic Policy Research Institute Universal social pensions open the door to more expansive social protection in Nepal. The significance of social pensions has...

One Pager No. 216 ? How to Provide Basic Income Security to all Elderly People? By Krzysztof Hagemejer and Valérie Schmitt, International Labour Organization The Social Protection Floors Recommendation adopted in 2012 urges all countries to establish as quickly as possible and maintain floors...

A behavioural analysis of the distributional impacts of tax policy and public spending shows that the Brazilian tax system has remained quite regressive, and, as an innovation, there have been gains, some quite significant, in the progressivity of social spending. While, in 2003, the...

Expected Years of Schooling (EYS) is a measure of the number of years of schooling a child at the start of his/her education trajectory is expected to receive, if current rates of enrolment are maintained throughout the child?s life (UNESCO, 2009). It is one of the components of the education...

A common concern about social protection programmes is that the transfers they provide may create disincentives for work. By raising incomes, transfer payments may encourage households to seek more leisure time and reduce their participation in the labour force or the number of hours worked,...

Both long-term climate change and immediate-term economic crises are bringing the issue of food security into sharper relief, particularly in those Caribbean countries where food security is already volatile and faces a series of risks and challenges. Climate change, in particular, adds urgency...

Camargo et al. (2013) discuss the socio-economic profile of Programa Bolsa Família (PBF) recipients5 based on an analysis of the information available in the Single Registry. In March 2013, the Single Registry database contained information on 24.5 million families, of which 23 million (91 per...

At independence all the countries of the former Soviet Union inherited extensive social welfare, including a comprehensive pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pension system with low retirement ages (60 for men and 55 for women) and generous opportunities for early retirement for selected worker groups such as...

In a comparatively short period of time, programmes providing direct transfers in cash and in kind to households in poverty have expanded to reach between 740 million and 1 billion people in the South. The book Social Assistance in Developing Countries provides a comprehensive account of the...

The Bolsa Família Programme, the biggest cash transfer programme of its kind, is now 10 years old. It is only natural that we should start to think about its future. When speculating about the programme?s near future, two distinct visions come to mind. In the first, by transferring cash to...