A large share of the population in Zambia is living below the national poverty line. To reduce poverty, in 2019, the government initiated the Cash Plus reform, which aims to build on the existing Social Cash Transfer as a floor benefit with...
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...
This study explores the relationship between household poverty and depth of informality by proposing a new measure of informality at the household level. It is defined as the share of activities (hours worked or income earned) without social...
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...
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...
Sri Lanka, like the Nordic countries, is a social democratic nation with a strong welfare state. It is classified as a ‘high human development’...
How can we ensure a resilient and inclusive recovery from COVID-19? How can we hold on to the target of eradicating poverty and hunger by 2030, with...
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...
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...
Part of Journal Special Issue SOUTHMOD: Modelling Tax-benefit Systems in Developing Countries
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...
This paper considers the implications of COVID-19 relief measures for the building and extension of comprehensive and universal social protection systems. It highlights three key areas emerging from the crisis, which are likely to affect the shape of...
This study evaluates which type of benefit—a universal benefit, a proxy mean-tested benefit, or a categorical benefit— better cushions the poverty effects of income shocks in a developing economy. We compare the effectiveness of the three benefit...
This paper analyses the effectiveness of tax-benefit systems in reducing poverty and inequality across 13 countries in the Global South. Using national survey data and tax-benefit microsimulation models from the SOUTHMOD project, we provide a cross...
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...
About three years have passed since the South African government introduced the COVID-19 Temporary Employer-Employee Relief Scheme (TERS) in response...
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...
Four years ago, in 2014, Juan Villa spent three months at UNU-WIDER in our PhD Fellowship Programme. I spoke to him on a sunny September afternoon...
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...
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...
Part of Book The Politics of Social Protection in Eastern and Southern Africa
Part of Book The Politics of Social Protection in Eastern and Southern Africa
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...
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...
Part of Book The Politics of Social Protection in Eastern and Southern Africa
Part of Book The Politics of Social Protection in Eastern and Southern Africa
Part of Book The Politics of Social Protection in Eastern and Southern Africa
Part of 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...
Literature on social protection in Kenya shows progress in implementation of cash transfers but not the social health insurance scheme. With a dearth of explanation for this contrasting promotion of social protection, this paper examines the role of...
Since the early 2000s international development agencies have actively promoted social protection as a new global public policy. This process can be understood as flowing from related shifts within the global political economy and of development...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
COVID-19 has had a far greater economic impact than health impact on Papua New Guinea (PNG) and the Pacific. There has been extensive commentary about...
Access to effective social insurance in Latin America is typically determined by workers’ status in the labor market – whether they have formal or...
Part of Journal Special Issue Welfare and distributive effects of social assistance in the Global South
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...
Working for an international organisation presents a host of challenges, given the vast nature of tasks that one must surmount in a fast paced and...
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that African tax and social-benefit systems are currently ill-equipped to protect households from sudden income losses...
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...
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...
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...
Part of Journal Special Issue What sustains informality
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...
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...
Designing and implementing public policies requires caution to guarantee the best use of scarce resources, especially in middle- and lower-income...
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...
Like most other countries, the government of Zambia introduced restrictions to control COVID-19, which considerably curtailed normal economic activity...
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...
How can Global South countries improve their tax and social protection systems? One way is to take advantage of tools that help assess the impact of...
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...
Despite advancements for gender equality in some spheres, labour market outcomes for women continue to be worse than for men. Gender gaps in pay, labour force participation rates, and measures of job quality are stubbornly persistent and continue to...
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...
Part of Book COVID-19 and the Informal Economy
ZANMOD, the tax-benefit microsimulation model for Zanzibar, was launched in November 2023. The model will aid local authorities and researchers in...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Mozambique ranks in the bottom 20 of the human development index, with nearly two-thirds of its population (18.9 million people) living below the USD...
Join the network
