Mass media and social marketing programs are cheap, scalable, and potentially effective means of influencing consumers'financial behavior and decisions. In light of this potential, and in order to provide clear policy direction, this paper provides an overview of the existing and ongoing...

Several East Asian countries, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, are considering an expansion of their social safety net programs. In many cases, existing delivery mechanisms for social assistance in the region tend to be basic, in line with the small size of programs. In a context...

Social insurance and other arrangements for funding health-care benefits often establish long-term relationships, effectively providing insurance against lasting changes in an individual's health status, engaging in burden-smoothing over the life cycle, and entailing additional elements of...

The paper contains a framework for linking social protection with growth and productivity, an updated review of the literature, new original work filling in gaps in the available evidence, and a discussion of operational implications. The paper demonstrates that there was a shift in the...

The paper develops an operational definition of governance that can be applied to social protection. The 2004 World Development Report (WDR) accountability framework acts as a starting point, defining accountability in terms of a set of principal?agent relationships between policymakers,...

Demand for social protection is growing in low income countries and fragile situations. In recent years, the success of social protection (SP) interventions in middle income countries (MICs) like Brazil and Mexico, along with the series of food, fuel, and financial crises, has prompted...

This paper presents a framework for designing and implementing social protection and labor (SP&L) systems in middle and low income countries. Although the term'system'is used to describe a country's set of social protection programs, these tend to operate independently with little or no...

The main goal of this paper is to draw lessons from the past to better understand the role and potential of social protection in response to crisis, and support the definition of the World Bank social protection and labor strategy 2012-2022. This paper uses selected crises (1990-present), their...

This paper reviews labor market trends throughout the developing world, identifies issues and policy priorities across groups of countries, and derives implications for the World Bank's new social protection and labor strategy. Five key issues are identified: a high and growingshare of the labor...

This study investigates the performance of private pensions systems across countries a topic which has yet to be adequately addressed in the literature. Specifically, this study examines the relationship between pension fund performance (as captured by gross real rates of return and the three...