This paper reports on proceedings from an international workshop on social funds, held on May 21-24, 1997, in Washington, DC. The objectives of the workshop were to take stock of a decade's implementation experience of social funds with a view to assessing their impact on poverty reduction; establish a broad consensus on their main achievements, weaknesses, and risks; generate a set of recommendations for improving existing operations as well as for the design of future social funds; and facilitate the integration of international and regional networks of social funds.

Annotation World Bank Discussion Paper No. 375.Social funds have proved to be important instruments for reaching the poor using community-based strategies. Yet, while there have been innovations in the design of these funds, the projects are much less participatory and demand-oriented than is commonly believed. This paper examines the extent to which social fund subprojects are designed to support community participation, demand orientation, and investment in local organizational capacity to achieve sustainability at the community level.

The need for social safety nets has become a key component of poverty reduction strategies. Over the past three decades several developing countries have launched a variety of programs, including cash transfers, subsidies in-kind, public works, and income-generation programs. However, there is little guidance on appropriate program design, and few studies have synthesized the lessons from widely differing country experiences. This report fills that gap. It reviews the conceptual issues in the choice of programs, synthesizes cross-country experience, and analyzes how country- and region-specific constraints can explain why different approaches are successful in different countries.

Over the past two decades, the percentage of the world’s population living on less than a dollar a day has been cut in half. How much of that improvement is because of—or in spite of—globalization? While anti-globalization activists mount loud critiques and the media report breathlessly on globalization’s perils and promises, economists have largely remained silent, in part because of an entrenched institutional divide between those who study poverty and those who study trade and finance. Globalization and Poverty bridges that gap, bringing together experts on both international trade and poverty to provide a detailed view of the effects of globalization on the poor in developing nations, answering such questions as: Do lower import tariffs improve the lives of the poor? Has increased financial integration led to more or less poverty? How have the poor fared during various currency crises? Does food aid hurt or help the poor? Poverty, the contributors show here, has been used as a popular and convenient catchphrase by parties on both sides of the globalization debate to further their respective arguments. Globalization and Poverty provides the more nuanced understanding necessary to move that debate beyond the slogans.

This book is a must read for researchers and students interested in poverty, poverty reduction, social welfare and development. It provides systematic and comparative studies on the design features, achievements and problems of targeting, set against specific national contexts. The economic focus of the analysis is balanced with sections on the political economy of targeting and management aspects (administrative systems and incentives). While the considerable variations between targeting mechanisms, schemes and contexts demonstrate the difficulties of blanket policy prescriptions, the book presents a fascinating conclusion. Rather than continuing the debate about universal versus targeted approaches, it proposes that a mixed approach might be best: the broad targeting of basic services such as primary education and health care combined with the narrow targeting of social protection schemes for the very poor. David Hulme, University of Manchester, UK Most governments attempt to target resources directly at the poor through a variety of measures including food and credit subsidies, job creation schemes and basic health and education projects. These measures are usually classified as being either promotional (to help raise welfare in the long term), or protectional (to support the poor in times of adverse shocks). However, for many Asian countries the reality of these poverty targeting measures has proved disappointing. Following a comprehensive overview by the editor, this book offers a detailed assessment of the results of directly channelling resources to the poor and extensively discusses the experience of five Asian countries India, Indonesia, the People s Republic of China, the Philippines and Thailand. The authors demonstrate how in many cases these targeting measures have failed due to their high cost and errors of both undercoverage (where many of the poor are excluded) and leakage (when many of the better-off also benefit from these schemes). The authors conclude that whilst poverty targeting remains a critically important objective, past targeting errors must not be forgotten and improved methods of both identifying and reaching the poor must be implemented. Written by leading experts in the field and including analysis of original country surveys, this seminal text documents clearly the operation and success of aid schemes in Asia. This book will make a worthy addition to the literature on development, poverty reduction, social welfare and Asian studies. It will also be an important source of reference for academics and students of economic development, aid practitioners, government officials and development NGOs.