The fight over the reauthorization of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) in Summer/Fall 2007 highlights the fragility of the U.S. safety net. Ballooning federal deficits threaten all social spending in this country, but programs for vulnerable women and children may be most at risk. Unlike Social Security, most of these programs must be periodically reauthorized in order to c...

Reductions in work effort in response to increased income transfers and the failure of those transfers to promote selfsufficiency have prompted renewed interest in employment as an antipoverty strategy. The two papers presented at this session together summarized much of what is now known concerning the effects that economic fluctuations exert on the poor, and why two decades of government empl...

Developing country governments often delegate authority over the targeting of antipoverty programs to community organizations, while retaining control over how much goes to each community. We offer a theoretical characterization of the information structure in such programs and the interconnected behavior of the various players. Our model motivates an econometric specification for explaining di...

Labor Market Impacts of a Large-Scale Public Works Program: Evidence from the Indian Employment Guarantee Scheme Recent years have seen an increasing interest in using public-works programs as antipoverty measures in developing countries. This paper analyzes the rural labor market impacts of the Indian National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, one of the most ambitious programs of its kind, b...

The paper provides a comparative analysis of the incidence of evaluation methods in antipoverty transfer programmes in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. The paper identifies two broad explanations for the incidence of evaluation in antipoverty transfer programmes in developing countries, one emphasizing the advantages of a shift towards evidence-based development policy, and a second explan...

The paper provides a comparative analysis of the incidence of evaluation methods in antipoverty transfer programmes in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. The paper identifies two broad explanations for the incidence of evaluation in antipoverty transfer programmes in developing countries, one emphasizing the advantages of a shift towards evidence-based development policy, and a second explan...

and obscures the secular increase in real expenditure on means-tested transfer programs taken as a whole. Indeed, Figure 1, which shows expenditures since 1968 in the 80 largest programs in the country, indicates that per-capita expenditure on means-tested programs is higher today than ever in its history. The enormous growth in real expenditure that occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s, ...

Child poverty can be reduced by policies that help families earn more and supplement earned income with other sources of cash. A comprehensive antipoverty strategy could use a combination of these approaches. This article reviews recent U.S. experience with these broad approaches to reducing child poverty and discusses lessons from abroad for U.S. policymakers. The evidence reviewed suggests th...