Person:
Grosh, Margaret

Social Protection and Jobs Global Practice
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Social safety nets, Poverty analysis, Labor markets, Social protection
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Social Protection and Jobs Global Practice
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Last updated: January 31, 2023
Biography
Margaret Grosh is the Senior Advisor for the World Bank’s Social Protection and Jobs Global Practice. She has written, lectured, and advised extensively on social protection programs, especially on targeting and cash transfer programs, globally and for Latin America. She has extensive experience with social protection both for responding to a crisis and for improving equality of opportunity. Earlier, she served as Lead Economist in the Latin American and Caribbean Region’s Human Development Department, led the team for Social Assistance in the World Bank’s Global Social Protection Department and, before that, the Living Standard Measurement Study in the Research Department. She holds a Ph.D. in economics from Cornell University.

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Start date: 2000 × End date: 2009 × Subject: SOCIAL ASSISTANCE ×

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Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    For Protection and Promotion : The Design and Implementation of Effective Safety Nets
    (Washington, DC : World Bank, 2008) Tesliuc, Emil; Grosh, Margaret; Ouerghi, Azedine; del Ninno, Carlo
    All countries fund safety net programs for the protection of their people. Though an increasing number of safety net programs are extremely well thought out, adroitly implemented, and demonstrably effective, many others are not. This book aims to assist those concerned with social policy to understand why countries need social assistance, what kind of safety programs will serve those best and how to develop such programs for maximum effectiveness. Safety nets are part of a broader poverty reduction strategy interacting with and working alongside of social insurance; health, education, and financial services; the provision of utilities and roads; and other policies aimed at reducing poverty and managing risk. Though useful, safety nets are not a panacea, and there are real concerns over whether they are affordable and administratively feasible or desirable in light of the various negative incentives they might create. In most settings where there is political will to do so, such concerns can be managed through a number of prudent design and implementation features. Much information and innovation exist on these topics; this book summarizes, references, and builds on this knowledge base to promote well-crafted safety nets and safety net policy.
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    Conditional Cash Transfers : Reducing Present and Future Poverty
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2009) Schady, Norbert; Fiszbein, Ariel; Ferreira, Francisco H.G.; Keleher, Niall; Grosh, Margaret; Olinto, Pedro; Skoufias, Emmanuel
    The report shows that there is good evidence that conditional cash transfers (CCTs) have improved the lives of poor people. Transfers generally have been well targeted to poor households, have raised consumption levels, and have reduced poverty, by a substantial amount in some countries. Offsetting adjustments that could have blunted the impact of transfers, such as reductions in the labor market participation of beneficiaries, have been relatively modest. Moreover, CCT programs often have provided an entry point to reforming badly targeted subsidies and upgrading the quality of safety nets. The report thus argues that CCTs have been an effective way to redistribute income to the poor, while recognizing that even the best-designed and best-managed program cannot fulfill all of the needs of a comprehensive social protection system. CCTs therefore need to be complemented with other interventions, such as workfare or employment programs and social pensions. The report also considers the rationale for conditioning the transfers on the use of specific health and education services by program beneficiaries. Conditions can be justified if households are under investing in the human capital of their children, for example, if they hold incorrect beliefs about the returns to these investments; if there is "incomplete altruism" between parents and their children; or if there are large externalities to investments in health and education. Political economy considerations also may favor conditional over unconditional transfers: taxpayers may be more likely to support transfers to the poor if they are linked to efforts to overcome poverty in the long term, particularly when the efforts involve actions to improve the welfare of children.
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    Rethinking School Feeding Social Safety Nets, Child Development, and the Education Sector
    (World Bank, 2009) Bundy, Donald; Grosh, Margaret; Jukes, Matthew; Drake, Lesley
    This review highlights three main findings. First, school feeding programs in low-income countries exhibit large variation in cost, with concomitant opportunities for cost containment. Second, as countries get richer, school feeding costs become a much smaller proportion of the investment in education. For example, in Zambia the cost of school feeding is about 50 percent of annual per capita costs for primary education; in Ireland it is only 10 percent. Further analysis is required to define these relationships, but supporting countries to maintain an investment in school feeding through this transition may emerge as a key role for development partners. Third, the main preconditions for the transition to sustainable national programs are mainstreaming school feeding in national policies and plans, especially education sector plans; identifying national sources of financing; and expanding national implementation capacity. Mainstreaming a development policy for school feeding into national education sector plans offers the added advantage of aligning support for school feeding with the processes already established to harmonize development partner support for the education for all-fast track initiative.