Working Paper
Market Responses to Anti-Hunger Policies
The way markets respond to anti-hunger policies can have considerable bearing on their effectiveness. This paper investigates market responses to various policies, including direct transfer payments, relief work, food pricing policies, public grain...
Working Paper
Regulation of Social Services in the Least Developed Countries
The privatization trend affecting the state involvement in productive sectors is also challenging the role of the state in the provision of social services. And, as private participation in social sectors increases, a regulatory framework is needed...
Working Paper
Worker retraining and transfer payments
We conduct an incentive-theoretical analysis of political economy considerations in the design of social protection programmes in developing countries to accompany economic reforms. We focus on two aspects of social protection—the provision of...
Working Paper
Institutionalizing segregation
Some claim that certain forms of social protection, conditional cash transfers in particular, result in perverse incentives for recipients in order to stay eligible for receiving benefits. This notion has a bearing on the design of social protection...
Working Paper
Redistribution Does Matter
Recent development literature has placed priority on poverty reduction, and on possible growth enhancement from a more equal distribution of assets and income. At the same time, empirical work consistently shows that economic growth is no more than...
Working Paper
Do Public Transfers Crowd Out Private Transfers?
The paper will use the data from the PROGRESA evaluation to show the extent to which such a programme crowds out private transfers. An interesting aspect of the paper is the fact that it can use the randomization (one-third of the villages in the...
Journal Article
Risk sharing and public transfers
We use public transfers in the form of food aid to test for the presence of risk sharing arrangements at the village level in rural Ethiopia. We reject perfect risk-sharing, but find evidence of partial risk-sharing via transfers. There is also...
Working Paper
The Transition from Official Aid to Private Capital Flows
India’s capital account displays a sharp swing in external financing from official assistance to private capital transfers in the 1990s. This paper examines the implications of this transition for the country. An analysis of the private resource...
Working Paper
Can Food-for-Work Programmes Reduce Vulnerability?
Food-for-work (FFW) programmes have been widely heralded as a means of providing self-targeting transfers coupled with investment in public goods. This paper reviews the changing context that has sparked such interest in FFW, the simple theory that...
Working Paper
Assessing the Impact of Fiscal Policy on Poverty
Fiscal policy measures are a key means by which governments can influence distribution and poverty, but in fact the relationships between fiscal policy and poverty are not well understood. The most commonly used technique for assessing the...