Download or read book Protecting the Poor from Macroeconomic Shocks written by Francisco H. G. Ferreira and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 1999 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To minimize the harmful impact on poor people of macroeconomic shock, sound policies for dealing with crises, and an adequate public safety net should be in place before a crisis starts.
Download or read book Protecting the Poor from Macroeconomic Shocks written by Francisco H. G. Ferreira and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 23 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To minimize the harmful impact on poor people of macroeconomic shocks, sound policies for dealing with crises - and an adequate public safety net - should be in place before a crisis starts. Many developing countries faced macroeconomic shocks in the 1980s and 1990s. The impact of the shocks on welfare depended on the nature of the shock, on initial household and community conditions, and on policy responses.To avoid severe and lasting losses to poor and vulnerable groups, governments and civil society need to be prepared for a flexible response well ahead of the crisis. A key component of a flexibly responsive system is an effective permanent safety net, which will typically combine a workfare program with targeted transfers and credit. Once a crisis has happened, several things should be done:Macroeconomic policies should aim to achieve stabilization goals at the least cost to the poor. Typically, a temporary reduction in aggregate demand is inevitable but as soon as a sustainable external balance has been reached and inflationary pressures have been contained, macroeconomic policy should be eased (interest rates reduced and efficient public spending restored, to help offset the worst effects of the recession on the poor). A fiscal stimulus directed at labor-intensive activities (such as building rural roads) can combine the benefits of growth with those of income support for poor groups, for example.Key areas of public spending should be protected, especially investments in health care, education, rural infrastructure, urban sanitation, and microfinance.Efforts should be made to preserve the social fabric and build social capital.Sound information should be generated on the welfare impacts of the crisis.This paper - a joint product of the Poverty Group, Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network, and Poverty and Human Resources, Development Research Group - is part of a larger effort in the Bank to inform policy choices aimed at minimizing the social costs of macroeconomic shocks.
Download or read book Who is Most Vulnerable to Macroeconomic Shocks written by Paul Glewwe and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 1995 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper attempts to answer the question: Who is most vulnerable to declines in welfare during a macroeconomic shock? After clarifying the difference between poverty and vulnerability, an analytical framework is presented and then applied to household panel data from Peru. Major findings are: (a) households with better educated heads are less vulnerable; (b) female headed households are not more vulnerable to declines than male headed households; (c) households with more children are more vulnerable to macroeconomic shocks; and (d) transfer networks that may assist the poor in relatively stable periods do not appear to protect them during a major shock, with the exception of transfers that originate from outside Peru.
Download or read book The Poverty and Distributional Impact of Macroeconomic Shocks and Policies written by Boniface Essama-Nssah and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2005 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The importance of distributional issues in policymaking creates a need for empirical tools to assess the social impact of economic shocks and policies. This paper reviews some of the modeling approaches that are currently in use at the World Bank and other international financial institutions. The specification of these models is dictated by the issues at stake, the knowledge about the nature of the process involved, and the availability and reliability of relevant data. Furthermore, shocks and policies have macroeconomic, structural, and distributional implications. This creates interdependence between such policy issues. Finally, the distributional impact of shocks and policies hinges on the heterogeneity of socioeconomic agents with respect to endowments and behavior. In the end, each modeling approach should be judged on how well it handles the interdependence between policy issues and the heterogeneity of the stakeholders, given other constraints. " -- Cover verso.
Download or read book Shock Waves written by Stephane Hallegatte and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2015-11-23 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ending poverty and stabilizing climate change will be two unprecedented global achievements and two major steps toward sustainable development. But the two objectives cannot be considered in isolation: they need to be jointly tackled through an integrated strategy. This report brings together those two objectives and explores how they can more easily be achieved if considered together. It examines the potential impact of climate change and climate policies on poverty reduction. It also provides guidance on how to create a “win-win†? situation so that climate change policies contribute to poverty reduction and poverty-reduction policies contribute to climate change mitigation and resilience building. The key finding of the report is that climate change represents a significant obstacle to the sustained eradication of poverty, but future impacts on poverty are determined by policy choices: rapid, inclusive, and climate-informed development can prevent most short-term impacts whereas immediate pro-poor, emissions-reduction policies can drastically limit long-term ones.
Download or read book Adaptive Social Protection written by Thomas Bowen and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2020-06-12 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adaptive social protection (ASP) helps to build the resilience of poor and vulnerable households to the impacts of large, covariate shocks, such as natural disasters, economic crises, pandemics, conflict, and forced displacement. Through the provision of transfers and services directly to these households, ASP supports their capacity to prepare for, cope with, and adapt to the shocks they face—before, during, and after these shocks occur. Over the long term, by supporting these three capacities, ASP can provide a pathway to a more resilient state for households that may otherwise lack the resources to move out of chronically vulnerable situations. Adaptive Social Protection: Building Resilience to Shocks outlines an organizing framework for the design and implementation of ASP, providing insights into the ways in which social protection systems can be made more capable of building household resilience. By way of its four building blocks—programs, information, finance, and institutional arrangements and partnerships—the framework highlights both the elements of existing social protection systems that are the cornerstones for building household resilience, as well as the additional investments that are central to enhancing their ability to generate these outcomes. In this report, the ASP framework and its building blocks have been elaborated primarily in relation to natural disasters and associated climate change. Nevertheless, many of the priorities identified within each building block are also pertinent to the design and implementation of ASP across other types of shocks, providing a foundation for a structured approach to the advancement of this rapidly evolving and complex agenda.
Download or read book Essays on the Macroeconomics of Poverty Reduction written by Radhicka Kapoor and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poverty remains one of the most pressing issues of our time. Understanding the impact of macroeconomic policy on poverty through growth and distribution of income is of considerable interest and this is what I examine in this dissertation. In Chapter 1, 'The Arithmetic of the Poverty-Growth- Inequality Triangle-Evidence from States of India', I use an arithmetic approach to examine how growth and income distribution matter simultaneously to poverty reduction by separating changes in poverty into a growth and distribution component. The results indicate that the poor benefit more from increasing aggregate growth than reducing inequality. In fact, bulk of the poverty reduction is concentrated in a period which witnessed the steepest increase in inequality since the effect of growth on poverty was large enough to overturn the effect of adverse distributional changes. Also, there is a great deal of heterogeneity in the poverty reduction performances of states, in particular the growth elasticity of poverty. I examine this heterogeneity in Chapter 2, 'The Empirics of the Poverty-Growth-Inequality Triangle: Does High Initial Poverty Matter?- Evidence from Rural India'. The more equal the initial income distribution and the higher the initial level of development, the greater is the growth elasticity of poverty. This empirical analysis also examines the impact of initial poverty on the pace of poverty reduction via its impact on economic growth and growth elasticity of poverty. Initial poverty has no adverse impact on growth; however it may lower the growth elasticity of poverty slightly. Furthermore, I find evidence of poverty convergence. In Chapter 3, 'Fiscal Policy and Macroeconomic Stabilility: Automatic Stabilizers Work, Always and Everywhere', I examine what can be done to protect the poor from macroeconomic shocks and volatility. Developed countries have in place in-built Counter cyclical automatic stabilizers to protect the poor from macroeconomic shocks and volatility and there is a vast literature on their effectiveness in reducing output volatility. Their effectiveness in developing countries has not been empirically validated. Using a sample of 49 countries, we estimate the impact of automatic stabilizers on output volatility and find that they strongly contribute to output stability regardless of the type of economy.
Download or read book The Economics of Poverty Traps written by Christopher B. Barrett and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-12-07 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What circumstances or behaviors turn poverty into a cycle that perpetuates across generations? The answer to this question carries especially important implications for the design and evaluation of policies and projects intended to reduce poverty. Yet a major challenge analysts and policymakers face in understanding poverty traps is the sheer number of mechanisms—not just financial, but also environmental, physical, and psychological—that may contribute to the persistence of poverty all over the world. The research in this volume explores the hypothesis that poverty is self-reinforcing because the equilibrium behaviors of the poor perpetuate low standards of living. Contributions explore the dynamic, complex processes by which households accumulate assets and increase their productivity and earnings potential, as well as the conditions under which some individuals, groups, and economies struggle to escape poverty. Investigating the full range of phenomena that combine to generate poverty traps—gleaned from behavioral, health, and resource economics as well as the sociology, psychology, and environmental literatures—chapters in this volume also present new evidence that highlights both the insights and the limits of a poverty trap lens. The framework introduced in this volume provides a robust platform for studying well-being dynamics in developing economies.
Download or read book Economic shocks and child wasting written by Headey, Derek D. and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on with total page 37 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In developing countries macroeconomic volatility is common, and severe negative economic shocks can substantially increase poverty and food insecurity. Less well understood are the implications of these contractions for child acute malnutrition (wasting), a major risk factor for under-5 mortality. This study explores the nutritional impacts of growth shocks over 1990-2018 by linking wasting outcomes collected for 1.256 million children from 52 countries to lagged annual changes in national income. Difference-in-difference estimates suggest that a 10% annual decline in national income increases moderate/severe (WHZ<-2) and severe wasting (WHZ<-3) by 14 and 22 percent. An exploration of possible mechanisms suggests negative economic shocks increase risks of diarrhea, fever, and maternal underweight prevalence, and reduce child dietary diversity. Applying these results to the predicted economic impacts of COVID-19 suggests that millions of pre-school children are at increased risk of wasting and wasting-related morbidity and mortality unless urgent preventative action is taken.
Download or read book Insurance Against Poverty written by World Institute for Development Economics Research and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2005 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poor people in developing countries are often affected by droughts, floods, illness, crop failure, job loss, and economic downturns. Much of their energy goes into coping with these shocks and into day-to-day survival. While insurance and credit markets, combined with widespread social security, provide an important cushion against poverty in rich countries, the need for immediate survival may lock the poor into persistent poverty in developing countries.The poor in developing countries do have informal mechanisms to cope with risk and misfortune. These are based on income diversification, risk avoidance, self-insurance by saving together with family, and community-based mutual assistance. Nevertheless, the scope of these mechanisms remains limited. Repeated individual-specific shocks such as illness or pests, or covariate risks associated with drought, flood, or recession, undermine the ability of individuals and their families to cope withrisk.We now know much more about vulnerability to risk and how poor people cope. Even more importantly, we have learned much about the large long-term consequences of these risks, which condemns many to persistent poverty and excludes them from economic growth. But there is much that can be done. The micro-level studies that underpin this book offer new insights on how effective public action could be more effective in protecting the vulnerable against persistent poverty. Policy should focus onproviding a comprehensive menu of ex-ante and post-crisis protection mechanisms, including new forms of insurance, savings, safety nets, and the means to strengthen the poor's asset base. Local communities have a big role to play: public funds should not be used to replace indigenous community-basedsupport networks; rather they should be used to build on the strengths of these networks to ensure broader and more effective protection.With numerous thematic chapters and case studies of both best practice and of failure, from a mix of low-income and middle-income countries across the developing world, this book evaluates alternatives in widening insurance and protection provision, and makes an important contribution to the topical field of insurance and risk.
Download or read book Globalization and Poverty written by Ann Harrison and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 674 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2020 written by World Bank and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2020-12-23 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edition of the biennial Poverty and Shared Prosperity report brings sobering news. The COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic and its associated economic crisis, compounded by the effects of armed conflict and climate change, are reversing hard-won gains in poverty reduction and shared prosperity. The fight to end poverty has suffered its worst setback in decades after more than 20 years of progress. The goal of ending extreme poverty by 2030, already at risk before the pandemic, is now beyond reach in the absence of swift, significant, and sustained action, and the objective of advancing shared prosperity—raising the incomes of the poorest 40 percent in each country—will be much more difficult. Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2020: Reversals of Fortune presents new estimates of COVID-19's impacts on global poverty and shared prosperity. Harnessing fresh data from frontline surveys and economic simulations, it shows that pandemic-related job losses and deprivation worldwide are hitting already poor and vulnerable people hard, while also shifting the profile of global poverty to include millions of 'new poor.' Original analysis included in the report shows that the new poor are more urban, better educated, and less likely to work in agriculture than those living in extreme poverty before COVID-19. It also gives new estimates of the impact of conflict and climate change, and how they overlap. These results are important for targeting policies to safeguard lives and livelihoods. It shows how some countries are acting to reverse the crisis, protect those most vulnerable, and promote a resilient recovery. These findings call for urgent action. If the global response fails the world's poorest and most vulnerable people now, the losses they have experienced to date will be minimal compared with what lies ahead. Success over the long term will require much more than stopping COVID-19. As efforts to curb the disease and its economic fallout intensify, the interrupted development agenda in low- and middle-income countries must be put back on track. Recovering from today's reversals of fortune requires tackling the economic crisis unleashed by COVID-19 with a commitment proportional to the crisis itself. In doing so, countries can also plant the seeds for dealing with the long-term development challenges of promoting inclusive growth, capital accumulation, and risk prevention—particularly the risks of conflict and climate change.
Download or read book Protecting the Poor written by International Labour Office and published by International Labour Organization. This book was released on 2006 with total page 682 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This compendium brings together the latest thinking of leading academics, actuaries, and insurance and development professionals in the microinsurance field. The result is a practical, wide-ranging resource which provides the most thorough overview of the subject to date. The book allows readers to benefit from the valuable lessons learned from a project launched by the CGAP Working Group on Microinsurance to analyse operations around the world. This volume covers the many aspects of microinsurance in detail including product design, marketing, premium collection and governance. It also discusses the various institutional arrangements available for delivery such as the community-based approach, insurance companies owned by networks of savings and credit cooperatives and microfinance institutions. The roles of key stakeholders are also explored and the book offers insightful strategies for achieving the right balance between coverage, costs and price.
Download or read book Protecting Pro Poor Health Services During Financial Crises written by and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2018 written by World Bank and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2018-12-10 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The World Bank Group has two overarching goals: End extreme poverty by 2030 and promote shared prosperity by boosting the incomes of the bottom 40 percent of the population in each economy. As this year’s Poverty and Shared Prosperity report documents, the world continues to make progress toward these goals. In 2015, approximately one-tenth of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty, and the incomes of the bottom 40 percent rose in 77 percent of economies studied. But success cannot be taken for granted. Poverty remains high in Sub- Saharan Africa, as well as in fragile and conflict-affected states. At the same time, most of the world’s poor now live in middle-income countries, which tend to have higher national poverty lines. This year’s report tracks poverty comparisons at two higher poverty thresholds—$3.20 and $5.50 per day—which are typical of standards in lower- and upper-middle-income countries. In addition, the report introduces a societal poverty line based on each economy’s median income or consumption. Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2018: Piecing Together the Poverty Puzzle also recognizes that poverty is not only about income and consumption—and it introduces a multidimensional poverty measure that adds other factors, such as access to education, electricity, drinking water, and sanitation. It also explores how inequality within households could affect the global profile of the poor. All these additional pieces enrich our understanding of the poverty puzzle, bringing us closer to solving it. For more information, please visit worldbank.org/PSP
Download or read book Household Vulnerability and Resilience to Economic Shocks written by Simon Feeny and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-22 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the vulnerability and resilience to economic shocks at the household level, this book draws on extensive research activities carried out in two Melanesia countries: the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. In particular, it identifies the household impacts of the recent food, fuel and economic crises. The contributors also examine resilience by identifying how households responded to these recent economic events in order to cope with their impacts. Findings indicate that households are vulnerable to a range of shocks and often struggle to cope with their impacts. Shocks are making it harder for households to meet their basic needs. Households in Melanesia are facing increasing demands for money, in particular for school fees, basic foodstuffs and customary obligations. Concurrently, there are limited domestic opportunities for formal employment. Traditional social support networks are strong and are an important form of resilience. However, there is evidence that they are disintegrating. Of particular focus are the gendered impacts. Women are found to bear a disproportionate share of the burden in adjusting to household shocks. The authors highlight key areas in which public policy and development programmes can reduce household vulnerability and increase their resilience to future economic shocks.
Download or read book Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2016 written by World Bank Group and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2016-10-12 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2016 is the first of an annual flagship report that will inform a global audience comprising development practitioners, policy makers, researchers, advocates, and citizens in general with the latest and most accurate estimates on trends in global poverty and shared prosperity. This edition will also document trends in inequality and identify recent country experiences that have been successful in reducing inequalities, provide key lessons from those experiences, and synthesize the rigorous evidence on public policies that can shift inequality in a way that bolsters poverty reduction and shared prosperity in a sustainable manner. Specifically, the report will address the following questions: • What is the latest evidence on the levels and evolution of extreme poverty and shared prosperity? • Which countries and regions have been more successful in terms of progress toward the twin goals and which are lagging behind? • What does the global context of lower economic growth mean for achieving the twin goals? • How can inequality reduction contribute to achieving the twin goals? • What does the evidence show concerning global and between- and within-country inequality trends? • Which interventions and countries have used the most innovative approaches to achieving the twin goals through reductions in inequality? The report will make four main contributions. First, it will present the most recent numbers on poverty, shared prosperity, and inequality. Second, it will stress the importance of inequality reduction in ending poverty and boosting shared prosperity by 2030 in a context of weaker growth. Third, it will highlight the diversity of within-country inequality reduction experiences and will synthesize experiences of successful countries and policies, addressing the roots of inequality without compromising economic growth. In doing so, the report will shatter some myths and sharpen our knowledge of what works in reducing inequalities. Finally, it will also advocate for the need to expand and improve data collection—for example, data availability, comparability, and quality—and rigorous evidence on inequality impacts in order to deliver high-quality poverty and shared prosperity monitoring.