Ajwad assesses the effectiveness of core social protection programs in Uttar Pradesh using the following criteria: i) coverage, ii) targeting efficiency; and iii) adequacy and potential impact on household welfare. The study is largely a quantitative assessment. Five main findings emerge from...

This paper assesses the impact of social assistance benefits on household welfare in Moldova. Ignoring standard issues of impact evaluations such as selection bias, behavioral responses, unobserved heterogeneity and endogeneity, an incidence analysis suggests that increased spending on social...

This paper uses a newly assembled data set on various types of social protection spending in 154 countries during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 to analyze the effect of the electoral cycle on the size and composition of the social protection stimulus budget. The analysis shows that the...

In this paper, Arbache, Go, and Page examine the recent acceleration of growth in Africa. Unlike the past, the performance is now registered broadly across several types of countries-particularly the oil-exporting and resource-intensive countries and, in more recent years, the large- and...

Using firm-level data covering 709 cities in 128 countries, this paper examines the role of a comprehensive list of business environment variables at the subnational level in explaining firm employment and productivity growth. The analysis finds basic protection, access to finance and...

In the past 10 years, Ethiopia experienced high and consistent growth, invested in public goods provision to poor households, and saw impressive gains in well-being for many households. This paper exploits variation in sectoral growth and public goods provision across zones and time, to examine...

We propose alternative methods to project pension rights and implement them in Chile and Uruguay and partially in Argentina. We use incomplete work histories databases from the social security administrations to project entire lifetime work histories. We first fit linear probability and duration...

This paper discusses the analytical foundations of international comparisons for assessing a country's potential for improvement along various dimensions of social and economic development. The paper presents the Stochastic Frontier approach and applies it to estimate feasible frontiers or...

Effective development policymaking creates a need for reliable methods of assessing effectiveness. There should be, therefore, an intimate relationship between effective policymaking and impact analysis. The goal of a development intervention defines the metric by which to assess its impact,...