Using a case study approach, this comparative review examines the operational arrangements of child-focused accompanying measures in nutrition and parenting from 19 cash transfer programs. It covers both family-focused cash transfer programs for households with children, and public works...

Several developing economies have recently introduced conditional cash transfer programs, which provide money to poor families contingent on certain behavior, usually investments in human capital, such as sending children to school or bringing them to health centers. The approach is both an...

The study seeks to answer four questions that summarize the fundamental issues in the international debate about the capacity of social funds to improve beneficiaries' living conditions: o Do social funds reach poor areas and poor households? Do social funds deliver high-quality, sustainable...

This paper assesses how household context and characteristics shape the welfare trajectory and more specifically the accumulation of productive assets among beneficiaries of the Vision 2020 Umurenge Programme in Rwanda, the government's flagship social assistance program. The analysis is based...

Daily hotel data are employed, along with information on prices, revenue, demand and hotel occupancy, to analyze part of the local economic impact of the annual New York City (NYC) Marathon. As the largest competitive race in the world, the marathon attracts domestic and international...

Poverty and crises are rapidly “urbanizing†. Yet experience with operationalizing cash transfers in urban areas is limited. This paper captures early lessons from a new generation of urban cash transfer responses to Covid-19 in eleven African countries. The analysis contextualizes...

This paper presents a framework for designing and implementing social protection and labor (SP&L) systems in middle and low income countries. Although the term 'system' is used to describe a country's set of social protection programs, these tend to operate independently with little or no...

The care economy is essential in daily life and a driver of economic growth, human capital development, and employment. Gender is a defining characteristic of the care economy. Women spend 3.2 times more time on unpaid care work than men and constitute the majority of the care workforce....

Social reforms typically require long-term, incremental policy changes. Traditional World Bank (WB) funding for discrete investments or technical assistance often had little broad policy impact. Even sector adjustment loans tended to be too inflexible and short-term to support ongoing social...

Historically, Colombia's "safety nets" were economic growth and a now unsustainable expansion of social services, notably in health, education, and pensions. Social assistance (SA) was not included in the dramatic social sector reforms of the 1990s, implying that the social safety net did not...