Public spending aims to promote efficiency and equity. This paper, drawn from a book on public spending and the poor, is concerned with the latter. In it, the author focuses on three key questions: what is the welfare objective? how are the benefits of public spending currently distributed? how...

How does Vietnam's public safety net affect outcomes for the poor? Although social welfare programs in Vietnam are centrally mandated, they are locally implemented according to local norms and local poverty standards and often rely heavily on local financing. The author examines the coverage,...

Public spending programs aimed at alleviating poverty can either be broadly targeted at categories of spending or narrowly targeted at types of people. Each approach has benefits and costs to the poor. It is often claimed that narrow targeting of the poor will allow governments to reduce poverty...

Widows and their children are largely hidden from view in the data used to inform social policy discussions in Africa. Data for Mali reveal that households headed by widows have significantly lower living standards than other households in rural and urban areas. Furthermore, the welfare...

Little is known about the situation facing widows and their dependent children in West Africa especially after the widow remarries. Women in Malian society are vulnerable to the loss of husbands especially in rural areas. Households headed by widows have significantly lower living standards on...

An effective public safety net can be important in a poor transition economy such as Vietnam. Yet we know very little about the performance of existing public transfers as a safety net. Using panel data, the paper investigates whether Vietnam's main social welfare transfers promoted poor people...

Institutional features of the African setting -- large extended families and imperfect credit and land markets -- matter to the equity and efficiency roles played by intergenerational linkages. Using original survey data on Senegal that include an individualized measure of consumption, this...