It has been suggested that Brazil’s unexpected successes in the last two decades are the outcome of a new model of development, with strong inclusive growth at its core. The paper reviews the main findings of the IRIBA research programme examining the contribution of macroeconomic stability...

The paper explores theoretically and empirically Brazil’s tax revenue from a political and political economy perspective. The absence of ‘big bang’ reforms to the tax code and tax administration suggests that policy models are less directly relevant to explaining the rise in the tax/GDP...

The paper examines the growth of antipoverty transfers in Brazil and their role in securing inclusive growth. Since the turn of the century, Brazil has managed to combine improvement in its growth performance, by the standards of recent decades, with substantial, and arguably unprecedented,...

The paper examines the significance of politics in the rise of social assistance programmes in developing countries in the last decade. It finds this is a two-way process. Politics is crucial to the adoption, design and implementation of social assistance programmes. They also have a feedback...

Abstract Human development conditional transfer programmes have been adopted by a majority of countries in Latin America to address the intergenerational persistence of poverty. Typically, programmes provide regular and reliable transfers in cash to households in poverty, with transfers...

The paper examines local economy effects of social transfers, by focusing on food consumption and asset holdings of non-eligible households in rural Mexico following the introduction of PROGRESA in 1997. The quasi-experimental nature of the evaluation data collected for the purposes of...

The paper applies a multidimensional and comparative approach to the assessment of wellbeing and deprivation among a panel of older people in Brazil and South Africa. It develops and justifies a counting approach to rank order wellbeing and deprivation distributions. An application of this...

Using a panel dataset of older people and their households in Brazil and South Africa, this paper provides estimates of changes in poverty among older people in Brazil and South Africa. It examines poverty status transitions of older people and their households over time. It measures the extent...

This paper provides an overview of the recent extension of social protection in sub- Saharan Africa. It identifies two main ‘models’ of social protection in the region: the Southern Africa and Middle Africa models. It then assesses the contrasting policy processes behind these models and...

The paper constructs a case for arguing that poverty researchers need not worry about inequality (as poverty researchers). It reviews conceptualisations of poverty as essentially relational, a particular reflection of prevailing inequalities. In this approach, people are in poverty because they...