Access to energy is fundamental to improving quality of life and is a key imperative for economic development" (Energy Poverty Action). This is particularly true in Central Asia where winters are harsh and long. Changes in energy prices affect the purchasing power of households, hitting the poor...

During the 1980s and 1990s "Active labour" market reforms opened up labour markets in Europe, making them more flexible without putting in jeopardy the essence of the social security protection model. Countries that went furthest in such "active labour" market reforms such as the UK, the...

Poverty indicators often disagree about whether a person is poor or not. Yet, when it comes to assessing whether a programme is successful in reaching the poor the dominant practice is to use an income poverty indicator. This paper investigates whether the choice of welfare indicator influences...

In this paper we argue that the Millennium Development Goals MDGs experience suggests that Global Social Governance GSG exists and that the MDGs have been an effective tool in creating a global accountability framework despite shortcomings mainly arising in the formulation process. The paper...

In recent years the there has been an increasing recognition of the potential of the innovation systems concept to provide new ways of making more effective use of agricultural research and improve its impact on socially desirable outcomes. This paper documents the experiences of a group of...

The European economy is currently in a slump, the worst since the 1930s. Although this is often seen as a consequence of the financial crisis that hit the capitalist world in 2007-8, we argue that many of the problems that Europe faces today have long-term roots to do with the fact that Europe...

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the impact in terms of poverty and cost of the introduction of social (or non-contributory) pensions in Europe. We use data from the household survey EU-SILC and focus on 17 countries. We simulate - in a static framework - the introduction of two social...

This study assesses how child deprivation in Ontario compares to that of Ontario's population in general and that of children in eight European high-income countries (France, Germany, United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden). This research has been motivated by the...

Do remittances and social assistance have different impacts on household expenditure patterns While two separate strands of literature have looked at how social assistance or remittances have been spent, few studies have compared them directly. Using data from a nationally representative...

There has been an ongoing debate among researchers, policy-makers and development partners in low-income countries on whether and to what degree non-contributory social transfers should be targeted to the poor or paid out universally to every citizen or to all citizens in a particular category....