Social protection encompasses the policy architecture supporting the standard of living of disadvantaged or vulnerable groups. Social protection systems typically include a mix of contributory schemes (social insurance), labor market interventions, and non-contributory welfare benefits and entitlements (such as transfer programs, training, public employment and humanitarian aid programs), and play a key role in supporting global sustainable development. Social safety nets may help ensure a strong, healthy and resilient workforce to meet the demands of private sector-led growth in developing countries, increase faith in government and support for redistribution, thereby promoting social capital, trust and shared values required for constructive engagement between civil society and the public sector, and mitigate inequality. Our team of researchers work with governments and international organizations to design, implement, and evaluate social protection interventions using rigorous methodologies and novel data sources.
Our projects include:
Conditional cash transfers (CCTs) have spread rapidly in developing countries in the past decade. While there is extensive literature assessing their impacts health, education and other outcomes, little attention has been paid to beneficiaries’ subjective experiences of CCT design. This study explored how beneficiaries of Argentina’s flagship CCT, the Universal Child Allowance, perceive the programme’s unique design features. We found that male and female beneficiaries tend to support targeted transfers to female carers, and that confusion about payment schedules has important implications for beneficiary engagement. Analysis of these findings offers useful insights into how CCT programme design may affect outcomes. This study was funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council.
This study focused on two noncontributory Mexican pension programs for the elderly. Both programs paid similar amounts, but one paid monthly while the other paid every two months. The Life Cycle Hypothesis suggests frequency of benefits payments should not affect consumption smoothing, and yet we found that the monthly program was more effective in smoothing food expenditure. It also increased doctor visits and reduced the incidence of hunger spells. In contrast, under the bimonthly program, expenditures on food significantly declined between paychecks, although ownership of durable goods increased. Our study contributes evidence to the importance of payment frequency in social programs.
In this study we critically examine the current state and recent trends in the landscape of social security programs in China and Mexico. A common thread across these countries is the introduction and recent expansion of old-age pension programs with noncontributory components. Using data from nationally-representative surveys we analyze trends in the levels and correlates of social security coverage in both countries. The most notable development is the increase in public pension coverage for the elderly population in recent years. In China, coverage rates for the population 70 and older grew from 33 percent in 2011 to 68 percent in 2015; and in Mexico from 32 percent to 55 percent in the 10 years following 2002. The newly expanded programs also caused significant changes on the determinants of coverage in ways that share similarities across countries. Variables such as educational attainment, urban status, and an employment history in the formal sector, were strong predictors of public pension receipt in the earlier survey-waves, but not in the most recent ones for China and Mexico. However, a strong relationship remains, and is unchanged across time, between those same characteristics and the average income pension amount. Based on these results, we conduct simulations that show, for example, that even rapid transformation of the labor market or education levels of the population would not radically change the proportion covered by pension programs but would largely increase average pension amounts.