Despite some progress, poverty remains elevated and education and health outcomes are lagging. This paper finds evidence of inefficiencies in education, health, and social protection spending in Niger. Programs are typically not well-targeted, some are regressive, and there are significant...

Ghana administers multiple social protection programs. One of these, pensions provided by the Social Security and National Insurance Trust, has a long history, but others-the Ghana School Feeding Programme, Labor-Intensive Public Works program, Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty program, and...

This study investigates the impact of social and physical infrastructure spending on the non-oil tradable and non-tradable sectors while controlling for non-oil capital stock and employment in the Azerbaijani economy for the period 1995-2014. The analysis employs the Engle-Granger and...

This paper seeks to understand how welfare spending is affected by beliefs about fairness. The political science literature points to the median voter theorem and the effects of political institutions. The economics literature argues that the difference between American and European welfare...