In this new version of the database we have included pilot social assistance programmes. A number of pilot cash transfer programmes have been introduced in Latin America, Asia and Africa in the last year or so, and a few more are in the design stage. Their scale and rationale suggest there is a...

The hypothesis that ethnic diversity has a negative impact on public goods provision is widely accepted. Notably, most work on this issue fails to distinguish adequately between national versus subnational governance. We find that subnational empirical ev

This paper discusses different approaches to the measurement of global interpersonal in equality. Trends in global interpersonal inequality during 1975-2005 are measured using data from UNU-WIDER.s World Income Inequality Database. In order to better unde

Preventable and treatable childhood diseases, notably acute respiratory infections and diarrhoeal diseases are the first and second leading causes of death and morbidity among young children in developing countries. The fact that a large proportion of chi

This paper follows a quasi-experimental research design to assess the impact of the electronic payment system of Mexico.s Oportunidades programme. The switch from cash payments to electronic payments delivered via a bank account is found to have implicati

This paper develops a model of opportunistic behaviour in which an incumbent government resort to expansionary fiscal and/or monetary stimuli to foster economic growth and thus, maximize the probability of re-election. Using a panel dataset of 51 African

Notwithstanding the unprecedented attention devoted to reducing poverty and fostering human development via scaling up social sector spending, there is surprisingly little rigorous empirical work on the question of whether social spending is effective in

Social protection programmes have emerged as one of the most important anti-poverty policy strategies in developing countries. Their effects on poverty and well-being have been widely studied. Yet, there is limited knowledge on how a transfer programme sh

This paper presents an estimation of the impacts of microcredit on labor and human capital following a quasi-experiment specifically designed to control for endogeneity and selection bias in the context of urban Mexico. We find important indirect trickle-down effects of credit through labor...

This paper provides an overview of the political and economic context under which Mexico’s Progresa-Oportunidades was introduced to prelude the emergence of social assistance in Latin America. The paper identifies four distinctive features of the programme that were revolutionary in their own...