All over the world, pension systems have financing difficulties that need to be addressed. There are three ways of dealing with pension systems problems - finance it to a greater extent from general revenues, rationalize the system, or a full-fledged reform. After several years of political and...

Public pension programmes in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries are difficulties. With aging populations, and declining participation of working age men in paid work, existing pension arrangements are likely to be unsustainable in the future in many of the...

This review summarizes the literature on disability and its relationship to pverty, including education, employment, income, and access to basic social services. Despite the dearth of formal analysis, it is clear that in developing countries, as in more developed areas, disabled people (and...

Collecting social security contributions is an important operational issue in all types of pension systems. Many regimes are plagued by poor compliance and weak, inefficient administration. Some countries have tried to introduce an automatic incentive to contribute by moving systems closer...

This report focuses on changes in the social protection system to lessen the social impact of the economic crisis that confronts the Russian Federation today. The report is not comprehensive and covers exclusively the crisis-related issues. It addresses the key challenges of 1) coping with...

This report makes an international comparison of the tax treatment of funded pensions and finds that the expenditure-tax system is the best way of taxing pensions because it does not distort the decision whether to consume now or save and consume in the future, unlike the comprehensive income...

The objective of this cross country study was to determine if there was any significant difference those individuals who participated in active labor programs (ALP) and similar individuals who did not participate in the programs (the comparison group), with regard to agreed outcome measures of...

Singapore is an affluent city state which finances its social security system through a mandatory, publicly managed, defined contribution system based on individual accounts. The main vehicle embodying this is the Central Provident Fund (CPF). There are two other pension systems operating in...

This paper analyzes the determinants of child labor in Africa as inferred from recent empirical studies. The empirical analysis is based upon three country studies undertaken in three different African countries, namely Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, and Zambia. Some support is found for the popular...

There is a growing consensus among development practitioners that participatory mechanisms are necessary in securing the success of development projects. Through the lens of social funds this paper looks at the concept of social capital in order to explain why participation is crucial for...