Since the late 1980s, extreme poverty has declined sharply, life expectancy and schooling have increased, and electoral democracy has expanded. However poverty reduction has slowed in recent years, particularly following the COVID-19 pandemic, amid intensifying conflict, fragility, climate...

The Philippines aspires to become a predominantly middle-class society by 2040. Significant strides have been achieved in the reduction of extreme poverty. However, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the fragility of recent gains and the vulnerability of many households to economic shocks. This study...

Joint programming, also referred to as convergence, in social protection and economic inclusion interventions has emerged as a critical strategy for addressing persistent poverty in the Philippines. Despite the government's ambitious target to reduce poverty from 18.1% in 2021 to 9% by 2028,...

The asymmetric impact of urbanisation on poverty reduction was examined for South Africa employing data from 1990 to 2022. The study was motivated by the need to establish the effects of positive and negative shocks on poverty reduction. The study used the non-linear autoregressive distributed...

A new generation of policies can trace the path from wealth to inclusion. Building on its urban and youthful population, Equatorial Guinea can shift from a model of extraction to one of prosperity. This report—the World Bank's first Poverty and Equity Assessment for Equatorial...

This study examines the career aspirations of economically disadvantaged Filipino children participating in the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps), the Philippines' flagship conditional cash transfer program. Using data from 9,958 children aged 10 to 25 collected through the Fourth Wave...

This working paper investigates the tension between market forces and welfare policies by applying Karl Polanyi's "double movement" study to pre- and posttransformation Poland. The analysis aims at providing a comprehensive perspective on how poverty relief policies impacted and have been...

The haor (Ox-bow Lake) region in Bangladesh, comprising seven districts, is rich in fishing, biodiversity, and boro-rice cultivation. However, its people are poorer due to wet monsoon seasonality. This study evaluates the joint impact of microcredit facilities and social safety net programs...

Colombia has a complex legal framework meant to protect the population against basic risks through a combination of contributory and non-contributory social insurance. The population is almost perfectly split between them, with eligibility to participate in the latter determined by poverty....

How effective are cash transfers at improving labour market outcomes in settings characterized by severe job scarcity and constraints to self-employment? This paper provides evidence of the labour market effects of South Africa's Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grant, a low-value, unconditional...

South Africa has a relatively well-developed social protection system for a middle-income country. Despite its roots in the country's racially discriminatory past, the system has been repurposed post-apartheid to address deep poverty and severe inequality. This paper explores key characteristics...

Chile combines high income levels and strong human development outcomes with persistent inequality. This paper examines the country's social protection matrix, focusing on its institutional configuration, financial structure, and main outcomes. The analysis distinguishes three core components-...

The paper examines the structure of the social protection system in Egypt including its contributory and non-contributory components. It begins by examining the historical evolution of the system, its scale and reach, and its sources of financing. The book then assesses the de jure and de facto...

How do systemic modes of discrimination-such as a caste system, or racial bias-impact the transmission of intergenerational opportunities in a developing country? What are the mechanisms by which discriminatory norms in labour and marriage markets affect such opportunities? How could we measure...

This study addresses the challenges facing Conditional Cash Transfer Programs (CCT) by investigating whether recipients are satisfied with health services and how contextual factors affect the utilization of health services. The study used binary logistic regression to determine households'...

The effects of poverty in childhood can last a lifetime. Research shows that children living in poverty have lower levels of health and wellbeing, attain lower levels of education, have lower levels of occupational attainment and are more likely to be poor in adulthood. In this report, we focus...

Joint programming, also referred to as convergence, in social protection and economic inclusion interventions has emerged as a critical strategy for addressing persistent poverty in the Philippines. Despite the government's ambitious target to reduce poverty from 18.1% in 2021 to 9% by 2028,...

Child poverty is of growing concern in Ireland and internationally due to the growing body of evidence on the detrimental effects of childhood socio-economic disadvantage on children, both in the short term and in the long term through loss of education, earnings and health. In Ireland, child...

Climate shocks increase poverty and reduce development gains and productive investments, in part because vulnerable households have poor financial resilience, are often not covered by public safety nets, and therefore have little ability to cushion the impacts of shocks. Globally, nearly one in...

This paper presents the first estimates of extreme child poverty and child poverty using the World Bank's recently revised international poverty lines. Using the international poverty line of $3.00 per day and the higher $8.30 per day poverty line (both expressed in 2021 purchasing power...

This policy note examines the role of social safety nets in addressing persistent poverty and inequality in Cameroon. Building on over a decade of implementation, Cameroon's main safety nets initiative-the Projet Filets Sociaux (PFS)-has laid important foundations but remains limited in scale...

The 2011-2020 period is the final stage of poverty alleviation in China, which emphasizes regional development. Using county-level panel data from 2006 to 2015, we explore the impact of regional poverty alleviation policy on economic growth of contiguous destitute areas (CDAs) in China. The...

We develop a framework to assess when social programmes should prioritize expanding coverage versus improving targeting accuracy. Rather than treating universalism and targeting as a binary choice, we derive a practical rule-of-thumb based on observed eligibility rates and programme quotas to...