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Targeting is a commonly used, but much debated, policy tool within global social assistance practice. Revisiting Targeting in Social Assistance: A New Look at Old Dilemmas examines the well-known dilemmas in light of the growing body of experience, new implementation capacities, and the potential to bring new data and data science to bear.The book begins by considering why or whether or how narrowly or broadly to target different parts of social assistance and updates the global empirics around the outcomes and costs of targeting. It illustrates the choices that must be made in moving from an abstract vision to implementable definitions and procedures, and in deciding how the choices should ...
This book assesses the prospects for achieving the sustainable development goals, and the role of international organizations in achieving them, in light of recent economic, medical, and environmental developments.
We think vulnerability still matters when considering how people are put at risk from hazards and this book shows why in a series of thematic chapters and case studies written by eminent disaster studies scholars that deal with the politics of disaster risk creation: precarity, conflict, and climate change. The chapters highlight different aspects of vulnerability and disaster risk creation, placing the stress rightly on what causes disasters and explaining the politics of how they are created through a combination of human interference with natural processes, the social production of vulnerability, and the neglect of response capacities. Importantly, too, the book provides a platform for ma...
In September 2001, staff from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund met with the objective of strengthening collaboration between the two organizations in projects of civil service reform. This strengthened collaboration will have key benefits in ensuring consistency between the conflicting goals of the two organizations, establishing realistic objectives within the reform process, and maintaining a core set of wage and employment data. The principal conclusion arrived at was that World Bank and IMF staff should be engaging in collaboration earlier in the reform process. To guide the collaboration, six foundations were identified. These include: develop a medium-term fiscal framework; foster national ownership by making reforms politically feasible; focus and streamline conditionality; agree on sequencing and timing of reforms; and strengthen data collection. These principals will be tested for effectiveness in several focus countries.
The best briefing on global warming the student or interested general reader could wish for.
"Analyses of how coveted central-government resources in Africa are shared have shown widespread patronage, ethnic cronyism, and pork-barrel politics. While some governments have attempted to rectify the situation by establishing revenue-sharing formulas, a key unanswered question is whether such institutions are able to achieve this goal. This paper presents an empirical investigation of a pioneering formula-based system of resource allocation from the central government to local governments in Ghana--the District Assemblies Common Fund (DACF). The evidence is consistent with governments being able to politically manipulate resource allocation within the confines of the formula-based system. Nevertheless, this does not suggest that the DACF completely fails to limit political influence. It indicates that other guiding structures of a formula-based system--in particular, how and when the formula can be altered--are important determinants of how well a program such as the DACF is able to resist political pressures."--Authors' abstract.
In addressing the pervasive problem of hunger in the developing world, reliable information on food insecurity is essential for effectively targeting assistance, developing interventions, and evaluating progress. Yet arriving at an accurate and comparable measure of food insecurity remains a challenge. This report introduces new estimates of food insecurity based on food acquisition data collected as part of national household expenditure surveys (HESs). The report explores the extent and location of food insecurity, the scientific merit of estimates derived from HES food data, the differences between HES-based estimates and those reported by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and-ultimately-how HES data can be used to improve the accuracy of the FAO estimates currently used to monitor progress toward reducing hunger
We examine correlations between the receipt of remittances from internal migrants and human capital investment in rural areas of India. We employ a propensity score matching approach to account for the selectivity of households into receiving remittances. We find a positive correlation between remittances received from internal migrants and the schooling attendance of teens. The magnitude of the correlation is greater when focusing on low-caste households, and male schooling attendance in particular becomes more positive and statistically significant. Our findings provide a basis for establishing future research in the areas of migration and social protection in India.
There is little rigorous evidence on the comparative impacts of cash and food transfers on food security and food-related outcomes. We assess the relative impacts of receiving cash versus food transfers using a randomized design. Drawing on data collected in eastern Niger, we find that households randomized to receive a food basket experienced larger, positive impacts on measures of food consumption and diet quality than those receiving the cash transfer. Receiving food also reduced the use of a number of coping strategies. These differences held both at the height of the lean season and after the harvest. However, households receiving cash spent more money on agricultural inputs. Less than 5 percent of food was sold or exchanged for other goods. Food and cash were delivered with the same degree of frequency and timeliness, but the food transfers cost 15 percent more to implement.