We draw some lessons from the Tunisian experience of social reforms and associated civil conflict. Our main interest is the riots that occurred after subsidy cuts and their possible substitution of price subsidies by direct cash transfers. We propose new welfare indicators apt to assess policy...

This paper introduces a new methodology to target direct transfers against poverty. Our method is based on estimation methods that focus on the poor. Using data from Tunisia, we estimate ‘focused’ transfer schemes that highly improve anti-poverty targeting performances. Post-transfer poverty...

The paper addresses the issue of rethinking the welfare state as a part of a broader national system of social protection (NSSP) and a mode of societal regulation. In order to overcome the theoretical limits of bottom-up comparative analysis of welfare states, one builds a structural model of...

Macroeconomic data on 45 countries are combined with microeconomic data on 4 case-study countries to reveal signifi cant differences in the levels of education attained under the different colonial powers in Africa during the colonial period. In 1960, former British colonies exhibited higher...

What is the kind of institutions that affect economic inequalities? Using a database on national income inequality for 73 non-European countries, we show that 'good governance' not only contributes to the level of income but also to a more equal distribution by increasing the income share of the...

The ownership of the development policies is the very basis of the new international consensus formulated in the Paris Declaration (2005). The theoretical foundations of this approach remain somehow unclear, and we can hardly consider that PRSPs are really “owned” by the recipient...

The ownership of the development policies is the very basis of the new international consensus formulated in the Paris Declaration (2005). The theoretical foundations of this approach remain somehow unclear. The main problem is that the Bretton Woods institutions “assess” the Poverty...