Structural transformation can spur economic growth and development if it increases overall productivity growth. A labor market environment that enables workers and enterprises to transition smoothly across sectors and into more productive economic pursuits can enhance the effect of structural...

This paper assesses the performance of government spending on social protection programs in reducing poverty and inequality in Lesotho, applying benefit incidence and microsimulation methods to 2017-2018 household survey data. The paper investigates the distributional effects of actual spending...

We contribute to the school-competition literature by evaluating a program that randomly assigned private schools to underserved villages in Pakistan. Program schools were provided a per-student subsidy to provide tuition-free primary education, with half of the treated villages receiving a...

The paper provides an overview of unemployment benefit systems in Central and Eastern Europe during the 1990s. It describes their institutional features (eligibility, the level and duration of benefits, and special rules), discusses issues arising in their implementation, and examines their...

Ghana has managed to consistently keep its poverty rate lower than the regional average over the past 25 years, but this positive trend slowed down recently. We investigate the dynamics of overall, moderate, and extreme poverty in Ghana during 2005/06-2016/17, addressing the lack of actual panel...

Ghana administers multiple social protection programs. One of these,pensions provided by the Social Security and National Insurance Trust,has a long history, but others-the Ghana School Feeding Programme,Labor-Intensive Public Works program, Livelihood Empowerment AgainstPoverty program, and...

This paper studies the effect of a local sectoral productivity shock on subnational structural transformation. The analysis is based on regional input-output tables constructed for 2004 and 2013 and available censuses of firms in 2003 and 2013 for Ghana. Based on the data, the analysis confirms...

Ghana administers multiple social protection programs. One, pensions provided by the Social Security and National Insurance Trust, has a long history, but the rest of the programs have been introduced and expanded over the past two decades. This study assesses the performance of the government...