'Measuring the Effectiveness of Social Protection: Concepts and Applications' provides the conceptual and analytical framework for assessing social protection (SP) programs, as well as provides a practical guide for users seeking to conduct analysis, particularly using the World Bank's Software...

This note provides guidance to policy makers who are looking to utilize Social Safety Nets (SSNs) to mitigate the welfare impacts of energy subsidy reforms (ESRs) on the poor. The good practice note explains (a) why SSNs are an effective tool in the context of ESR, and (b) different options for...

This report updates the assessment of the performance of the social protection (SP) system in Russia, using the 2014-2017 rounds of the Survey on Incomes and the Participation in Social Programs (VNDN in Russian) by the State Statistic Service of the Russian Federation (Rosstat), the largest...

It is widely accepted that the costs of underpricing energy are large, whether in advanced or developing countries. This paper explores how large these costs can be by focussing on the size of the external effects that energy subsidies in particular generate in two important sectors-transport...

Although the theoretical case for universal pre-primary education is strong, the empirical foundation is weak. In this paper, we contribute to the empirical case by investigating the effect of a large expansion of universal pre-primary education on subsequent primary school performance in...

This paper argues that Social Protection needs to be on the post-2015 agenda as a key element of the discourse. Based on a global Social Protection data set, it estimates that social protection programs are currently preventing 150 million people from falling into poverty. Even if all low-income...

This paper combines longitudinal household and community level survey data to evaluate the effect of infrastructure rehabilitation projects on household well-being in rural Georgia. The panel structure of the data is utilized in an empirical approach to control for time-invariant unobservable...