Mexico’s main social support program, Oportunidades, combines two methods to target cash to poor households: an initial self-selection by households who acquire knowledge about the program and apply for benefits, followed by an administrative determination of eligibility based on a means test....

The last decade has seen a sharp increase in interest in the possible existence of a Paradox of Redistribution (PoR) whereby narrow targeting of social transfers aimed at increasing their redistributive (poverty) impact has the perverse effect of increasing poverty over the medium term due to...

Fiscal policy is a key tool for achieving distributional objectives in advanced economies. Thispaper embeds the discussion of fiscal redistribution within the standard social welfareframework, which lends itself to a transparent and practical evaluation of the extent anddeterminants of fiscal...