The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed significant gaps in the coverage, comprehensiveness and adequacy of social protection systems worldwide. These gaps have jeopardized the health, incomes and jobs of billions of people. Closing these protection gaps, facilitating faster and inclusive...

Large and persistent gaps in social protection coverage, comprehensiveness and adequacy are linked to many barriers, including high levels of informality, institutional fragmentation of the social protection system and significant financing gaps for social protection in a context of limited...

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused massive disruptions to the global economy and forced policymakers to respond to the newly created challenges. Many policy institutions have therefore had to rethink their established approaches and their usual policy responses.

In developing countries, economic inequality is attracting considerable attention. Many factors including financial exclusion are key in explaining income gap in developing countries. This paper examines the effect of access to financial services through digital technologies on income...

We assess the non-contributory cash transfer systems in 17 Latin American and Caribbean countries to identify factors that keep them from reducing poverty and inequality. To perform this assessment, we analyze three dimensions of size (number of beneficiaries, size of transfer per beneficiary,...

The distributional impacts of fiscal policies are instrumental in reducing inequality in countries like the Philippines, where inequality has been persistently high. This paper assesses how equitable various taxes and transfers in the Philippines are by deriving the elasticities of Atkinson and...

Financial incentives affect the labour supply decisions of households, but typically the impact of such incentives varies significantly across household types. While there is a substantial literature on the labour supply effects of tax reforms and in-work benefits, the impact of changes in...

Access to identification cards (IDs) is often required to claim government benefits. However, it is unclear which policies to increase ID ownership are more effective. We experimentally analyze the effect of two policy interventions to induce the timely renewal of identification cards on access...

The study has assessed the welfare impacts of unconditional cash transfers of Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) by using impact evaluation panel surveys, conducted in 2011 (baseline) and 2016 (follow-up round). The panel survey contains information from both the beneficiary and...

Though social protection in sub-Saharan Africa is intensive to alleviate food insecurity of the vulnerable group such as women, its impact on the food security status of female-headed rural households has not been well documented. Accordingly, the present study aims to evaluate the effect of the...