Working Paper
Choices for spending government revenue
This paper examines a broad range of opportunities for addressing the pressing human development needs of low-income countries by using new oil, gas, and mineral discoveries. It assesses how much of an impact can be made on the funding gaps for...
Working Paper
Quantifying the impacts of expanding social protection on efficiency and equity
A large informal sector is a challenge for developing countries building up social protection systems. Expanding social safety nets reduces poverty, but financing them can increase the tax burden, potentially reducing availability of formal sector...
Working Paper
Inequality in China
In this paper we describe the major trends in China’s income inequality over the past 40 years and explain them as the outcome of four interleaved stories. The first story is a standard development story characterized by structural change, market...
Working Paper
Social protection for working-age women in Tanzania
Tanzania has expanded its social protection framework significantly over the past decade, but the country continues to grapple with important gender inequalities. This paper examines, first, the evolution and effects of Tanzania’s social protection...
Working Paper
The effectiveness of social protection in five African countries through normal times and times of crisis
We study the effectiveness of social protection benefits in reducing income and consumption poverty in five sub-Saharan African countries—Ghana, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia—in normal times and times of widespread economic crisis. Using...
Journal Article
Does the depth of informality influence welfare in urban sub-Saharan Africa?
We explore the relationship between household welfare and informality, measuring household informality as the share of members’ activities (hours worked or income) without social insurance. We discretize these measures into four bins or portfolios...
Working Paper
Social protection expansions during crisis and fiscal space
This study provides a first attempt to contribute a large-scale assessment of whether crisis response as observed during the COVID-19 pandemic can serve as a feasible blueprint for creating durable solutions across countries. Adopting a lens on...
Working Paper
Social protection floor gaps and pandemic relief measures: a case for universalism?
With the expansion of social protection measures due to the COVID-19 pandemic, considerations both old and new have surfaced regarding targeted versus universalist approaches. This study focuses on how social protection coverage before the pandemic...
Working Paper
The role of social protection and tax policies in cushioning crisis impacts on income and poverty in low- and middle-income countries
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, several countries enacted tax and social protection measures to help mitigate the economic hardship faced by individuals and households. This experience underscores the need to better understand the impact of...
Working Paper
Microsimulation approaches to studying shocks and social protection in selected developing economies
This paper calculates automatic stabilization in Ghana, South Africa, and Ecuador to explain income cushioning amid income and demand shocks. Fiscal policies within these countries are also stress tested to gauge welfare contingencies and insurance...
Working Paper
Simulation of options to replace the special COVID-19 Social Relief of Distress grant and close the poverty gap at the food poverty line
We use a fiscal incidence model based on the South African 2014/15 Living Conditions Survey to simulate the poverty reduction impacts of a selection of medium-to-long-term social grant options with the goal of replacing the existing special COVID-19...
Working Paper
Analysis of the distributional effects of COVID-19 and state-led remedial measures in South Africa
This paper explores the impact of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa on income poverty and inequality in South Africa. Using a static tax–benefit microsimulation model with input datasets that were adjusted to reflect people’s...
Working Paper
Informality and pension reforms in Bolivia
How social protection programmes affect work choices is a question that has been at the centre of labour economics research for decades. More recently, a scant literature has focused on the effects of social protection on work choices and informal...
Working Paper
Dynamic impacts of lockdown on domestic violence
We leverage staggered implementation of lockdown across Chile’s 346 municipalities, identifying dynamic impacts on domestic violence. Using administrative data, we find lockdown imposition increases indicators of distress related to domestic violence...
Journal Article
Analysis of the distributional effects of COVID-19 and state-led remedial measures in South Africa
This study explores the impact of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa on income poverty and inequality in South Africa. Using a static tax-benefit microsimulation model with input datasets that were adjusted to reflect people’s...
Technical Note
Feasibility study: simulating the impacts of farm subsidies on poverty and inequality in African countries
Agricultural subsidies may have significant productive and distributional consequences, and policy-makers need to be able to assess these impacts as a part of the overall tax and benefit policy. Microsimulation models offer a tool for such analysis...
Working Paper
Building a conservative welfare state in Botswana
Botswana’s welfare state is both a parsimonious laggard in comparison with some other middle-income countries in Africa (such as Mauritius and South Africa) and extensive (in comparison with its low-income neighbours to the north and east). Coverage...
Working Paper
Poverty, changing political regimes, and social cash transfers in Zimbabwe, 1980–2016
Since 2000, Zimbabwe has been under some pressure to provide more fully for its children. It is not clear whether child poverty has worsened, although AIDS, drought, and economic mismanagement have all compromised poverty reduction. In any case...
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
Social protection, electoral competition, and political branding in Malawi
Competitive elections in many parts of Africa generate powerful incentives to presidential candidates (and to a lesser extent political parties) to brand themselves in ways that transcend regional or ethnic loyalties. In Malawi, Joyce Banda—President...
Working Paper
Fiscal capacity and social protection expenditure in developing nations
There is scant analysis on the causal relationship between fiscal capacity and social protection expenditure in the developing world. We investigate the causal relationship between fiscal capacity of the state and social protection expenditure...
Working Paper
Social protection in an aspiring ‘developmental state’
Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme is among the largest social protection programmes in Africa and has been promoted as a model for the continent. This paper analyses the political drivers of the programme, arguing that elite commitment can...
News
Press release - AL20
United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) in partnership with the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE) will host the WIDER Annual Lecture 20 at the Stockholm School of Economics on 23 March 2016. The lecture will be delivered by Martin Ravallion, a leading economist in the study of poverty and policies for fighting it.
Working Paper
Welfare and redistributive effects of social assistance in the Global South
This paper presents an analysis of the recent evolution of social assistance in the developing world, looking at its complex typological configuration, which has interlinked with, and partly reflects the complex demographic and epidemiological...
Working Paper
Winning or buying hearts and minds?
This paper studies how household-level receipts of cash transfers affect political attitudes in Pakistan. The paper exploits the locally exogenous eligibility cut-off of the flagship Benazir Income Support Programme to estimate causal effects. The...
Book
The Politics of Social Protection in Eastern and Southern Africa
The notion that social protection should be a key strategy for reducing poverty in developing countries has now been mainstreamed within international development policy and practice. Promoted as an integral dimension of the post-Washington Consensus...
Policy Brief
The politics of social protection in Eastern and Southern Africa
Since the mid-1990s, there has been in Africa something of a ‘quiet revolution’ in poverty reduction strategies with the proliferation of social assistance programmes that entail cash transfers to the poor. The past two decades have also been...
Journal Article
Trade, poverty, and social protection in developing countries
How do shifts in trade affect social protections for the poor? Although the fraction of the world's population considered the “extreme” poor has fallen by over one-half over the past quarter century, many of those lifted above the global poverty line...
Working Paper
Financing the Zambia social cash transfer scale-up
This paper assesses the effects on poverty and inequality of the alternative targeting approaches that Zambia’s Social Cash Transfer programme could take as its expansion continues during the period of the country’s Seventh National Development Plan...
Policy Brief
Inequality dynamics in China
In the late 1970s, China embarked on a major programme of economic transition and reform. Since then, China’s economy has been transformed from a socialist planned economy to a predominately market economy characterized by a combination of state...
Working Paper
Trade, poverty, and social protection in developing countries
How do shifts in trade affect social protections for the poor? Although the fraction of the world’s population considered the ‘extreme’ poor has fallen by over one-half over the past quarter century, many of those lifted above the global poverty line...
Working Paper
Ideational and institutional drivers of social protection in Tanzania
In the early 2000s, there was low elite commitment to social protection in Tanzania. Yet, in 2012, the government officially launched a countrywide social safety net programme, and a year later it announced the introduction of an old age pension. In...
Working Paper
Aid’s impact on social protection in low- and middle-income countries
This study conducts an international comparative analysis of the recent evolution of social protection systems in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), and Asia-Pacific (APAC) regions, paying particular attention to the...
Working Paper
The politics of promoting social protection in Zambia
This paper examines the rise of the social protection agenda in Zambia, and demonstrates that this has two alternative drivers: shifting dynamics within Zambia’s political settlement and the promotional efforts of a transnational policy coalition. We...