The One Million Initiative aims to give one million people in rural Mozambique access to clean drinking water and adequate sanitation by constructing new water points and providing sanitation training. We use panel survey data for 1600 households to analyze the health impact of the Initiative....

This research assesses how low-income households in Western Kenya coped with the immediate economic consequences of the COVID-19 outbreak. It uses granular financial data from weekly household interviews covering six weeks before the first case was detected in Kenya to five weeks after. Our...

Participatory wealth rankings (PWRs) present an inclusive and inexpensive targeting method to identify poor households. They tend to be well received by participants but point to a systematically different understanding of welfare than implied by consumption-based rankings. This suggests that...

This paper focuses on inequalities in learning opportunities for individuals coming from different socioeconomic backgrounds as a measure of (in) equality of opportunity in OECD countries and looks at the role played by policies and institutions in shaping countries’ relative positions. Based...

In recent years, policymaking in China has put increasing emphasis on stemming the growth in inequality, which had been fairly steep since the 1980s. Policy action has taken the form of regional development measures and of reforms of various aspects of the social safety net broadly defined. The...

Welfare-to-work measures are a central theme of Israel’s labour and social policies to tackle relative poverty, which is concentrated among the Arab-Israeli and Ultra-orthodox (Haredi) communities. Policies include pilot programmes involving private-sector job placement (the “Wisconsin”...

In 2008, the Czech government implemented a major overhaul of the personal income tax (PIT), replacing the previous progressive rate schedule with a single 15% rate levied on an enlarged base. This was accompanied by significant changes to the corporate income tax (CIT) and an increase in the...

We exploit an age discontinuity in a Dutch disability insurance (DI) reform to identify the health impact of stricter eligibility criteria and reduced generosity. Women subject to the more stringent rule experience greater rates of hospitalization and mortality. A €1,000 reduction in annual...

Does participation in a social assistance program by parents have spillovers on their children's own participation, future labor market attachment, and human capital investments? While intergenerational concerns have figured prominently in policy debates for decades, causal evidence is scarce...

This paper reviews the main elements of social security reform in Brazil since 1998 and discusses areas where further policy action is yet to be taken to ensure the sustainability of the social-security system over time. Outlays on pensions paid to private-sector workers have risen as a result...