Risk and its consequences pose a formidable threat to poverty reduction efforts. This study reviews a plethora of community-based risk management arrangements across the developing world. These types of arrangements are garnering greater interest in light of the growing recognition of the...

The paper outlines a forward-looking role of social protection against the background of increasing concerns about risk, and vulnerability, exemplified by the recent East Asian crisis, the concerns of the World Development Report (WDR) 2000, the need for a better understanding of poverty...

This paper reviews the experience with public works programs (PWPs) in several countries over the past 20 years to delineate use patterns and to determine the factors contributing to its use as a successful safety net program. The analysis shows that PWP have been used extensively in response to...

The authors use the"Pesquisa Nacional por Amostragem a Domicilio"(PNAD) data for Brazil. Their paper asks two related questions. First, does the child labor status of parents impact the child labor incidence of their children? The authors find strong evidence that it does. Second, is this link...

This paper examines one type of program that is used by many OECD and CEEC countries (Central and Eastern European countries) to ease the pain of structural adjustment and create jobs, namely Public Service Employment (PSE). Such programs are characterized by the employment of unemployed...

The Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) approach offers an opportunity for civil society organizations, to join governments in the development, and implementation of poverty reduction strategies. Trade unions have been encouraged to participate. This report notes that most unions have been...

This paper argues that it is important to take into account unfunded public pension liabilities as part of an assessment of the overall fiscal situation, including the fiscal positions of pension schemes pre and post reforms. It examines the concept of the implicit pension debt (IPD) and...

The unemployment protection systems that exist in most Latin American economies are generally considered inadequate in terms of providing insurance to workers and are prone to generate stratified labor markets. Recently, research effort and policy interest has turned to Unemployment Insurance...

The purpose of this paper is to review what has been learnt from the growing volume of applied research on child labor and to indicate directions for future research. We start by looking at research by the World Bank, which has played a fairly pioneering role in this area in data collection and,...

This paper is aimed at identifying the sources of income insecurity and vulnerability among workers in the informal sector in developing countries and examines alternative approaches to social protection for the informal sector. This is followed by a discussion on the challenges of developing a...