This paper provides an overview of labor market trends, and key policy issues worldwide. It begins with a statistical overview of major indicators relating to the labor market, highlighting the diverging experiences between the high-income countries, and many developing regions. It then reviews...

A legacy of the command economy in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union is a social protection system that emphasizes institutional care for vulnerable individuals. It has been well established that in many cases institutionalization can be more expensive per client served and...

The paper is intended to provide an orientation to the past and present work of the Social Development network and a contribution to its future strategy. It presents a brief overview of the history of the Social Development network or family; it illustrates both continuity and change in the way...

Unemployment insurance has been the subject of numerous theoretical and empirical studies. These studies elucidate the benefits and the cost of unemployment insurance, namely, the improved allocation of risk bearing and the reduced incentives for work. In the past two decades a branch of the...

Prefunding of pension commitments in OECD (Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development) economies is increasingly seen as a central strategy to cope with the aging of their populations. This paper argues that investments in emerging markets can help at the margin but are unable to solve...

Practitioners from different disciplines use different meanings and concepts of vulnerability, which, in turn, have led to diverse methods of measuring it. This paper presents a selective review of the literature from several disciplines to examine how they define and measure vulnerability. The...

This paper will consider a range of consumer-oriented subsidy instruments, including general subsidies, and tax exemptions as well as targeted quotas. Section II discusses the distribution, or incidence of the subsidy expenditures for all these instruments. It focuses primarily on food as the...

This"toolkit"provides quantitative tools to practitioners who want to undertake risk and vulnerability assessments using household data. While one could use price, exchange rate, and balance of payments data to examine macroeconomic shocks, and rainfall data to assess the severity of droughts...

This paper investigates the hypothesis that children work because their income contribution is necessary for the household to meet subsistence expenditures. It uses the fact that a testable implication of this hypothesis is that the wage elasticity of child labor supply is negative. Previous...

A number of researchers have recently proposed a variety of different `vulnerability'measures designed to capture the welfare consequences of risk for poor households, and also proposed a variety of different approaches to estimating these various measures of household vulnerability. However,...