Over 2004-11, the World Bank Group program in Brazil aimed to support to government in achieving greater equity, sustainability, and competitiveness. IEG judges the outcome of the Bank Group program as moderately satisfactory, with some important variability across themes.

A reluctant participant in the Gonzalez family reunion, Daniel has some pleasant surprises and discovers the meaning of family.

This study highlights the interaction between social protection (SP) programs and labor markets in the Latin America region. It presents new evidence on the limited coverage of existing programs and emphasizes the challenges caused by high informality for achieving universal social protection for old age income, health, unemployment risks and anti-poverty safety nets. It identifies interaction effects between SP programs and the behavioral responses of workers, firms and social protection providers, which can further undermine efforts to expand coverage, summarizing evidence from recent work across the region. The book argues for a re-design of financing to eliminate cross subsidies between members of contributory programs and subsidies that effectively tax income from formal employment. It advocates well-targeted, tax-funded, tapered subsidies to provide incentives to the savings efforts of low-income workers, coupled with an effective safety net for the extreme poor who have no capacity to contribute to financing their own social protection arrangements. It also argues for the consolidation of programs and harmonization of benefits packages across different insurers. The book develops an overall conceptual framework and presents in-depth analysis of the main SP sectors of pensions, health, unemployment insurance and labor market programs, and safety net transfers.

Safety nets are noncontributory transfer programs targeted to the poor or vulnerable. They play important roles in social policy. Safety nets redistribute income, thereby immediately reducing poverty and inequality; they enable households to invest in the human capital of their children and in the livelihoods of their earners; they help households manage risk, both ex ante and ex post; and they allow governments to implement macroeconomic or sectoral reforms that support efficiency and growth. To be effective, safety nets must not only be well intended, but also well designed and well implemented. A good safety net system and its programs are tailored to country circumstances, adequate in their coverage and generosity, equitable, cost-effective, incentive compatible, and sustainable. Good safety nets are also dynamic and change over time as the economy changes or as management problems are solved and new standards are set. Drawing on a wealth of research, policy, and operational documents from both academia and the World Bank s work in over 100 countries, For Protection and Promotion provides pragmatic and informed guidance on how to design and implement safety nets, including useful information on how to define eligibility and select beneficiaries, set and pay benefits, and monitor and evaluate programs and systems. The book synthesizes the literature to date and enriches it with new examples on various program options cash transfers (conditional and unconditional), in-kind transfers, price subsidies, fee waivers, and public works. It concludes with a comprehensive diagnostic for fitting safety net systems and programs to specific circumstances.

Poverty reduction challenges in the twenty-first century are not the same as those from the previous century. The shift is due in no small part to climate change and climate-related weather disasters, such as extreme flood and drought. The magnitude and frequency of such events are only expected to increase in the coming decades, affecting more and more impoverished people across the globe. Poverty Reduction in a Changing Climate, edited by Hari Bansha Dulal, is a work which discusses the new innovations and funding mechanisms which have emerged in response to the rise of climate-related challenges in the twenty-first century. Dulal and the text's contributors explore the synergies and implications of those innovations with respect to poverty alleviation goals. This collection brings together a range of scholars from different backgrounds, ranging from political science, economics, public policy, and environmental science, all analyzing poverty reduction challenges and opportunities from different, forward-thinking perspectives.

The world today is more unequal than it has ever been before. Therefore, global inequalities represent a crucial issue of the contemporary global economy. This volume carries the title ‘Geopolitics, Discrimination, Gender, & Immigration’. It contains eleven selected papers which touch upon the topic of inequalities from various perspectives. The scope of the discussion in the papers is wide and it opens possibilities for further research in problems that are directly or indirectly related to inequalities of opportunity, gender issues, immigration and global policies.