The term safety nets encompasses various transfer programs designed to play both a redistributive and risk reduction role in poverty reduction. The redistributive role is intended to reduce the impact of poverty and the risk reduction role is intended to protect individuals, households, and communities against uninsured income and consumption risks.
The authors examine the literature to see how large private transfers in various developing countries are, why they are important, motives for them, and study the empirical evidence on patterns of private transfers.
This paper analyses how adjustment policies affected the poor in Asian economies, focusing on the period up to 1997. It shows that there was a significant reduction in both private income poverty and social income poverty over the previous thirty years.
The conceptual issues of targeting are well understood. Whether, how and how much to target social services or subsidies to the poor depends on balancing the benefits and costs in a given set of circumstances. The benefit of targeting is that it can concentrate expenditures allocated to poverty alleviation or social programs on those who need them most. This saves money and improves programs efficiency. The costs are the administrative cost of identifying potential beneficiaries, possible economic losses due to disincentive effects and any loss of political support for the programs.
This book reviews the debate on the terms of trade for agriculture in India and develops a computable general equilibrium model to simulate the income distribution and sectoral growth effects of alternative economic policies. The book also analyses the political economy of food prices in India.
All Our Kin is the chronicle of a young white woman's sojourn into The Flats, an African-American ghetto community, to study the support system family and friends form when coping with poverty.
The objective of social risk management is to enable vulnerable households to better manage risk. In this paper the authors present a conceptual framework to better understand the complex decision-making process at work in risk management at the household, community and extra-community levels.
This paper describes a computer model framework for tax-benefit modeling that provides flexibility in defining the specific parameters for use in a multitude of modeling purposes. It also illustrates possible approaches by reference to the EUROMOD tax-benefit model.
This paper examines the role of social capital in areas such as trading relationships, the acceptance of risk, the choice of sharing, loan approval, and bank investment to retain customers.
Most households in low-income countries deal with economic hardships through informal insurance, arrangements arising between individuals and communities on a personalized basis, rather than through markets or states. Examples include drawing down savings, engaging in reciprocal gift exchange, selling physical assets, and diversifying income-generating activities. These mechanisms can be highly effective in the right circumstances, but most recent studies show that informal insurance arrangements are often weak. In particular, poorer households appear to have substantial difficulties coping even with localized, idiosyncratic risks. In addition to helping households in the wake of large-scale natural disasters, public policy can help reduce vulnerability by encouraging flexible, private coping mechanisms while discouraging those that are fragile or that hinder economic and social mobility. Promising policies include creating self-regulating workfare programs and providing a supportive setting for institutions working to improve access to safe and convenient saving opportunities, credit, and crop and health insurance.
