The objectives of the Social Assistance Reform Program Project for Indonesia are to support the conditional cash transfer program coverage expansion, strengthen its delivery system, and improve its coordination with other complementary social programs.
... See More + Indonesia is the world’s largest archipelagic state, the fourth most populous nation, and the tenth largest economy with regard to purchasing power parity. It is a member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations group of countries that have a combined population of 608.4 million and is also a member of the G-20. With more than 17,500 islands, of which 6,000 are inhabited, Indonesia has a population of over 250 million, with 300 distinct ethnic groups and over 700 languages and dialects. With a gross national income per capita of about US$3,440 (2015), Indonesia is currently classified as a lower-middle-income country and will transition to an upper-middle-income country with continued economic growth. The World Bank is well positioned to support the Government of Indonesia through the Social Assistance Reform Program. The integration of family-based SA schemes for poor and vulnerable families through CCTs is one of the key strategies in the National Medium-term Development Plan (Rencana Pembangunan Jangka Menengah Nasional, RPJMN) 2015–2019. The three main criteria for selecting these DLIs are that (a) the desired results are within control of the implementing agency, MoSA; (b) the DLIs are achievable in the program period; and (c) the DLIs are verifiable. The DLIs are designed combining both scalability (financing proportional to the progress toward achievement) and floating (disbursements made when they are met) features.
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Honduras has experienced moderate economic growth in the past decade, in line with the rest of the region. Despite this growth track record, limited opportunities for decent jobs for the majority of workers have resulted in stagnant poverty and inequality rates that are still the highest in Central America (CA).
... See More + In parallel, progress in human development indicators has also been mixed in the last decade. In education, while primary enrollment has significantly increased, low coverage at all other levels of education, inequalities in access and low quality persist. In health, Honduras is close to achieving the 2015 child mortality Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), but maternal mortality, noncommunicable diseases (NCDs), and violence pose additional challenges. And despite advances in setting up a social protection system, fiscal sustainability and lack of coordination among interventions prevail, undermining poverty reduction efforts. The ability of the Honduras government to expand safety nets, to increase the access and quality of public education and health services, to engage in active labor market policies, and to improve human development indicators in general, remains limited for a number of reasons. First, overall real social public spending has been on the decline in the last few years. Second, low revenues and fiscal deterioration pose challenges to adequately financing needed social sector improvements. Third, challenges in budget formulation and execution (mainly due to institutional factors) also diminish the impact of social spending. But more importantly, Honduras needs to significantly improve the effectiveness and efficiency of its social spending. This note argues that moving forward Honduras should prioritize three main aspects: a) to rationalize and increase the effectiveness of social public spending by enhancing the pro-poor features of targeting mechanisms; b) to significantly redress the imbalance between recurrent spending, especially the wage bill, and capital expenditure; and c) to continue strengthening information systems tools, legislation, and institutions in an effort to consolidate programs into fewer and higher impact interventions. Sector-specific challenges aligned with these broad objectives are addressed below.
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The objective of the Income Support Program for the Poorest Project for Bangladesh is to provide income support to the poorest mothers in selected Upazilas, while (i) increasing the mothers use of child nutrition and cognitive development services, and (ii) enhancing local level government capacity to deliver safety nets.
... See More + The project has three components. (1) Cash transfers for beneficiary mothers components will finance quarterly cash transfers to eligible households. (2) Enhancing local level government capacity component will provide the necessary inputs to Local Government Division (LGD) to facilitate the implementation of the proposed cash transfers. This will include strengthening the capacity of: (i) Union Parishads to develop the beneficiary list based on the Bangladesh Poverty Database (BPD) being developed by SID, and supervise their enrolment into ISPP; (ii) Community Clinics (CCs) to deliver the ANC and GMP services, and the CNCD awareness sessions; and (iii) Union Post Offices (UPOs) to make electronic payments to beneficiaries using the Postal Cash Cards (PCCs) upon compliance with co-responsibilities. (3) Monitoring and evaluation component will be critical to assess progress in achieving the projects objectives, and the impact of cash transfers on household poverty and on CNCD outcomes. This component will thus provide the necessary inputs to help LGD monitor ISPP beneficiary selection, enrolment, compliance with co-responsibilities, payments, case management as well as any grievances or appeals. To facilitate these activities, this component will develop an automated Management Information System (MIS) by building on the existing Shombhob Pilot MIS.
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The proposed Social Protection System Project of Mexico has objectives to support the Governments effort to: (i) increase access of PROSPERA beneficiaries to social and productive programs, and (ii) develop instruments for an integrated social protection system.
... See More + The proposed Project would have two components. Component one is to support PROSPERAs efforts to improve beneficiaries social and economic wellbeing by promoting investment in human capital and strengthening the Programs linkage with other social and productive programs while ensuring continued improvements in the Programs service delivery to its beneficiaries. The objective of the second Component is to support SEDESOL to develop new technologies and policies that will allow for better planning of social and productive interventions based on the needs of the population, improving efficiency and effectiveness of spending.
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Ethiopia, like most developing countries, has opted to deliver services such as basic education, primary health care, agricultural extension advice, water, and rural roads through a highly decentralized system (Manor 1999; Treisman 2007).
... See More + That choice is based on several decades of theoretical analysis examining how a decentralized government might respond better to diverse local needs and provide public goods more efficiently than a highly centralized government. Ethiopia primarily manages the delivery of basic services at the woreda (district) level. Those services are financed predominantly through intergovernmental fiscal transfers (IGFTs) from the federal to the regional and then the woreda administrations, although some woredas raise a small amount of revenue to support local services. Since 2006, development partners and the government have cofinanced block grants for decentralized services through the Promoting Basic Services (PBS) Program. Aside from funding the delivery of services, the program supports measures to improve the quality of services and local governments capacity to deliver them by strengthening accountability and citizen voice.
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Publication 90430 SEP 02, 2014
Khan,Qaiser M.; Faguet,Jean-Paul; Gaukler,ChristopherDisclosed
Despite a decline in both monetary and multidimensional poverty rates since 2000, Haiti remains among the poorest and most unequal countries in Latin America.
... See More + Two years after the 2010 earthquake, poverty was still high, particularly in rural areas. This report establishes that in 2012 more than one in two Haitians was poor, living on less than $ 2.41 a day, and one person in four was living below the national extreme poverty line of $1.23 a day. Extreme poverty declined from 31 to 24 percent between 2000 and 2012, and there have been some gains in access to education and sanitation, although access to basic services is generally low and is characterized by important inequalities. Urban areas have fared relatively better than rural areas, reflecting more nonagricultural employment opportunities, larger private transfers, more access to critical goods, and services and narrowing inequality compared to rural areas. Continued advances in reducing both extreme and moderate poverty will require greater, more broad-based growth, but also a concerted focus on increasing the capacity of the poor and vulnerable to accumulate assets, generate income, and better protect their livelihoods from shocks. Special attention should be given to vulnerable groups such as women and children and to rural areas, which are home to over half of the population and where extreme poverty persists, and income inequality is increasing.
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The under-five mortality rate is a key indicator of child well-being, including health and nutrition status. It is also a key indicator of the coverage of child survival interventions and, more broadly, of social and economic development.
... See More + Millennium Development Goal 4 (MDG 4) calls for reducing the under-five mortality rate by two-thirds between 1990 and 2015. The world has made substantial progress, reducing the rate 49 percent, from 90 (89, 92) deaths per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 46 (44, 48) in 2013. Since 1990 almost 100 million children under age five roughly the current populations of the Philippines have been saved. The world is also reducing under-five mortality faster than at any other time during the past two decades. The global annual rate of reduction has steadily accelerated since 1990-1995 more than tripling from 1.2 percent to 4.0 percent in 2005-2013.
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The extent of inequality, and what to do about it, are among the most hotly debated issues in economics. Every faith and ideology has normative views on how much inequality is tolerable, or desirable.
... See More + And to complicate matters, equality along a dimension that matters for some members of society often entails inequality in some respect that others care about. Debates on inequality seem to become more intense in periods of rapid structural transformation, both in advanced economies and in developing countries. As jobs migrate abroad, or people move to cities, or a modern sector emerges, the entire distribution of well-being is shaken. Age-old rankings that seemed cast in stone become compromised, new fortunes are made sometimes quickly and the entire social fabric comes under stress.
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This study explores the changing opportunities for children in Africa. While the definition of opportunities can be subjective and depend on the societal context, this report focuses on efforts to build future human capital, directly (through education and health investments) and indirectly (through complementary infrastructure such as safe water, adequate sanitation, electricity, and so on).
... See More + It follows the practice of earlier studies conducted for the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region (Barros et al. 2009, 2012) where opportunities are basic goods and services that constitute investments in children. Although several opportunities are relevant at different stages of an individuals life, our focus on childrens access to education, health services, safe water, and adequate nutrition is due to the well-known fact that an individuals chance of success in life is deeply influenced by access to these goods and services early in life. Childrens access to these basic services improves the likelihood of a child being able to maximize his/her human potential and pursue a life of dignity.
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This issue includes the following: Does Urbanization Affect Rural Poverty? Evidence from Indian Districts by Massimiliano Cali and Carlo Menon.
... See More + Learning versus Stealing: How Important are Market-Share Reallocations to Indias Productivity Growth? by Anne E. Harrison, Leslie A. Martin, and Shanthi Nataraj. Structural Change and Cross-Country Growth Empirics by Markus Eberhardt and Francis Teal. Evaluating Program Impacts on Mature Self-help Groups in India by Klaus Deininger and Yanyan Liu. Wage Effects of High-Skilled Migration: International Evidence by Volker Grossman and David Stadelmann. Is Foreign Aid Fungible? Evidence from the Education and Health Sectors by Nicolas Van de Sijpe. Industry Switching in Developing Countries by Carol Newman, John Rand, and Finn Tarp.
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This report examines the level and changes in female and male participation rates, employment segregation, and female wages relative to male wages across the world economy.
... See More + It funds sufficient evidence to support the view that labor markets in developing countries are transformed relatively quickly in the sense that gender differentials in employment and pay are narrowing much faster than they did in industrialized countries. However, the report evaluates the inefficiencies arising from persisting gender differentials in the labor market and finds them to be potentially significant. The estimates also indicate that the resulting deadweight losses are borne primarily by women while men gain mainly in relative terms-there are no real winners from discrimination. The paper concludes that growth benefits women at large, inequalities can have significantly adverse effects on welfare, and market-based development alone can be a weak instrument doe reducing inequality between the sexes. To break the vicious cycle of women's low initial human capital endowments and inferior labor market outcomes compared to men's, the report proposes greater access to education and training for girls and women, enforceable equal pay and equal employment opportunities legislation, a taxation and benefits structure that treats reproduction as an economic activity and women as equal partners within households, and a better accounting of women's work to include invisible production.
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Working Paper (Numbered Series) 20051 APR 01, 1998
