The study seeks to answer four questions that summarize the fundamental issues in the international debate about the capacity of social funds to improve beneficiaries' living conditions: o Do social funds reach poor areas and poor households? Do social funds deliver high-quality, sustainable...

Unlike most development initiatives, conditional cash transfer programs recently introduced in the Latin America and the Caribbean region have been subject to rigorous evaluations of their effectiveness. These programs provide money to poor families, conditional on certain behavior, usually...

Conditional cash transfers are a departure from more traditional approaches to social assistance, that represents an innovative, and increasingly popular channel for the delivery of social services. Conditional cash transfers provide money to poor families, contingent upon certain behavior,...

This book helps us to understand development economics in light of the past half-century's experience of development thought and practice. This volume is an outgrowth of an intergenerational symposium on "the Future of Development Economics," held in Dubrovnik in May 1999. It collects the papers...

This paper analyses patterns of economic and social interactions that sustain the poor or, alternatively, isolate them yet further from other households, from the communities in which they live and, by extension, from social networks and economic opportunities. The study also assesses...

This guide has three objectives: First and foremost, it seeks to provide newcomers to the Administrative and political scene in Afghanistan with a basic guide to the structures and processes of government. Second and related, it intends to provide reformers with some understanding of how to work...

The Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics seeks to expand the flow of ideas among development policy researchers, academics, and practitioners from around the world. It is a premier forum for World Bank and other experts to exchange ideas, challenge one another's findings, and...

This report consists of a collection of case studies from Latin America combining qualitative and quantitative research methods for the analysis of poverty within a social exclusion framework. The first chapter provides an overview of the differences between quantitative and qualitative methods,...

"Much of the early work on poverty was highly quantitative:... It became increasingly clear, however, that while numbers are essential for policy and monitoring purposes, it is also important to understand people's perception of poverty and their mechanisms for coping with poverty and other...

This book synthesizes the findings from ten case studies that investigate whether, when, and how foreign aid affected economic policy in Africa, and reveals the range of African policy experience. Results varied enormously, for example, while Ghana and Uganda were successful reformers that grew...