Safety Nets are limited in Liberia and, although as a share of GDP, expenditures are higher than the regional average, the average benefit amount is equal to only 7-20 percent of the poverty line. The current system focuses on the country s most vulnerable populations but that the system is...

This study aims to assist the Government of Niger in developing a multi-sectoral approach to reducing the population s vulnerability to food insecurity. The study reviews food security policies and programs in Niger, and provides an action plan for strengthening the existing system and...

This paper solves and estimates a stochastic model of optimal inter-temporal behavior to assess how changes in the design of the income protection and pension systems in Brazil could affect savings rates, the share of time that individuals spend outside of the formal sector, and retirement...

This paper describes the recent reforms of pension policies adopted by Argentina and Chile. The structural reforms in the 1980s and 90s were targeted on improving the long term fiscal sustainability of the system and their institutional design, while transferring part of the economic and social...

The adequacy of contributory pensions for the middle classes depends on density of contribution. Density can be far below 100% because the State is unable or unwilling to impose the mandate to contribute on all jobs, especially on poor workers such as many in self-employment and small firms. The...

Incomplete and highly fragmented work histories threaten to leave many contributors of the pension schemes in Latin America without the minimum pension guarantee or even without access to the ordinary pension. We propose a methodology to assess this risk, identify vulnerable groups and study...

Conditional Cash Transfer programs (CCTs) provide money to poor families contingent upon certain verifiable actions, generally minimum investments in children s human capital such as regular school attendance or basic preventative health care. They therefore hold promise for addressing the...

There are separate pension schemes for civil servants in about half of the world s countries, including some of the largest developing economies, such as Brazil, China and India. In the higher-income, OECD countries, spending on pensions for public-sector workers makes up one quarter of total...

The paper investigates the demographic alternatives for dealing with the projected population aging and low or negative growth of the population and labor force in the North. Without further immigration, the total labor force in Europe and Russia, the high-income countries of East Asia and the...

The essence of generational accounting is to break down total net contributions in a given year to each cohort and to project this profile into the future. Using additional assumptions on the discount rate and the growth of productivity and population, the per capita net contribution of future...