This paper undertakes two calculations, one for all developing countries, the other for 34 developing countries that together account for 90 percent of the world's stunted children. The first calculation asks how much lower a country's per capita income is today as a result of some of its...

The authors assess the impact of Argentina's main social policy response to the severe economic crisis of 2002. The program aimed to provide direct income support for families with dependents, for whom the head had become unemployed due to the crisis. Counterfactual comparisons are based on a...

Community-level targeting of antipoverty programs is now common. Do local community organizations target the poor better than the central government? In one program in Bangladesh, the answer tends to be yes, but performance varies from village to village. The authors try to explain why. It is...

Argentina's Proempleo Experiment, conducted in 1998-2000, was designed to assess whether a wage subsidy and specialized training could assist the transition from workfare to regular work. Randomly sampled workfare participants in a welfare-dependent urban area were given a voucher that entitled...

A wage subsidy increased private sector employment among poor workers in a welfare-dependent region of Argentina, but extra skill training had no impact. Randomly sampled workfare participants in a welfare-dependent region of Argentina were given a voucher that entitled an employer to a sizable...

The authors provide evidence for intermediate and long-term effects of a large scale intervention that focuses on quality of nutritional and child-care inputs during the early stages of life. Their empirical strategy uses a combination of difference-in-difference and weighting estimators in a...

Monitoring data are generally collected as a by-product of the process of monitoring program implementation. Yet this rich source of data have not been exploited to assess the effectiveness of the program. In this paper the authors use detailed administered data from a large-scale,...

We study an innovative welfare program in Chile which combines a period of frequent home visits to households in extreme poverty, with guaranteed access to social services. Program impacts are identified using a regression discontinuity design, exploring the fact that programme eligibility is a...