In 1995, Save the Children/US-Malawi introduced a small pilot project called COPE-Community-based Options for Protection and Empowerment, to provide direct services to prevent, and mitigate the impact of HIV/AIDS on children, families, and communities in one district. Over the past six years,...

The objective of this policy note is to assist the Chinese government in assessing implementation of the unemployment insurance (UI) program to date, identifying key challenges, and exploring possible policy responses. The note begins with a background section on recent developments in the...

In this paper the authors present, and confront two approaches to modeling child labor. The first assume that parents are altruistic towards their offspring, while the second sees children as an asset to parents, especially in terms of old age security. The paper also extends the analysis to...

Arguably, the most important public policy initiative underway today in the Dominican Republic is the reform of its social security programs. The reform is taking place in the context of an economic crisis that will make a complex implementation process even more difficult in the first few...

This case study is part of six country case study reports that were commissioned in 2003 by the World Bank specifically for the purposes of a summary report on the design and implementation of household targeting systems in the following countries: Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Brazil and...

Practitioners from different disciplines use different meanings and concepts of vulnerability, which, in turn, have led to diverse methods of measuring it. This paper presents a selective review of the literature from several disciplines to examine how they define and measure vulnerability. The...

Non-farm household enterprises are important for a number of reasons to do with poverty and employment creation. They could either be the first unit of microentrepreneurship or a coping strategy for the poorest. Either way, over 11 percent of India's prime working age population is self-employed...

This paper investigates how enforcement of labor regulation affects firm size and other firm characteristics in Brazil. The authors explore firm level data on employment, capital, and output, city level data for economic city characteristics and new administrative data measuring enforcement of...

This paper gives an overview on current demographic trends and projected population change in Europe and neighboring regions. The main focus of the analysis is on Western and Central Europe. Today this world region has a total population of 500 million. Available forecasts until the year 2050...

This paper investigates the hypothesis that children work because their income contribution is necessary for the household to meet subsistence expenditures. It uses the fact that a testable implication of this hypothesis is that the wage elasticity of child labor supply is negative. Previous...