The 'affordability' of new or expanded social protection programmes depends on more than an assessment of the fiscal costs or the poverty-reducing or developmental benefits. Diverse international organizations have shown that programmes costing less than or about 1 per cent of GDP have...

Competitive elections in many parts of Africa generate powerful incentives to presidential candidates (and to a lesser extent political parties) to brand themselves in ways that transcend regional or ethnic loyalties. In Malawi, Joyce Banda - President from 2012 to 2014 - sought to distinguish...

European official development assistance to Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries increased sharply after 2011, ostensibly in support of the social, economic, and above all political changes demanded by the Arab uprisings. The subsequent turn to development policies driven by...

The World Bank's health sector projects in Timor-Leste - the Health Sector Rehabilitation and Development Project and the Second Health Sector Rehabilitation and Development Project - have been among the few successful operations it has funded in that country. This paper examines the factors...

This paper discusses past and current social policy strategies in the international aid architecture. From the 1990s, aid strategy and policy shifted to put a stronger emphasis on human development. This accelerated with the Millennium Development Goals and will continue under the Sustainable...

This survey of the 2016 replenishments of three multilateral development bank soft funds and of the Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria shows that a significant re-set of the multilateral development finance system is taking place, with grant funding from traditional donors generally in decline...

Six Southeast Asian countries (Cambodia, Lao People's Democratic Republic, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, and Thailand) defied Gunnar Myrdal's pessimistic prognosis in his 1968 volume, Asian Drama, regarding their prospects for development. In the past half-century, these countries raised...

In this paper, we analyse the relationship between China's structural transformation and the inclusiveness of its economic growth. China's economy has undergone significant structural changes since it initiated the economic reforms in 1978. Economic activities have shifted from the...

Growth that reduces poverty is often considered pro-poor regardless of whether the poor benefit from it more than the non-poor. Such growth could simply be termed poverty-reducing growth. This paper argues that for growth to be pro-poor it should disproportionally benefit the poor. The paper...

Macroeconomic instability has been increasingly considered as a factor lowering average income growth and, in this way, is a factor slowing down poverty reduction. But it can also result in slower poverty reduction for a given average rate of growth, due to poverty traps, often examined at the...