Other Social Protection Study
366 items available
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Publication
Adaptive Social Protection in Southern Africa
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-10-31)The countries of the Southern Africa Customs Union (SACU) - Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Namibia, and South Africa are exposed to climatic shocks, especially drought, that pose a continual threat to lives and livelihoods across the subregion. The pandemic has compounded these existing vulnerabilities. Climatic shocks such as these tend to affect the poorest most, exacerbating inequalities and increasing poverty. Food insecurity, which is chronic in the subregion and both a root cause of vulnerability to drought and an outcome of it also increased as a result of impacts from the pandemic. Social safety net programs can help poor and vulnerable households manage the risks they face from shocks, helping to mitigate the impacts on poverty and food insecurity, but their effectiveness can be constrained in several ways. The mobilization of social protection in response to COVID-19 and the challenges that have emerged to that mobilization have strengthened the case for investments in preparedness ahead of future shocks. Adaptive social protection refers to an agenda for preparing social protection systems to improve their response to shocks and to build the resilience of poor and vulnerable households. This report takes stock of ASP in four of the five SACU countries and provides targeted recommendations for each country’s development. -
Publication
Uneven Recovery in Latin America and the Caribbean: Are Women Being Left Behind?
(Washington, DC : World Bank, 2022-07)In Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), the effects of the pandemic on labor market outcomes continue to be pronounced, especially for women. Continued pronounced impacts on women’s employment are partly driven by a slow recovery of sectors that predominantly employ women. Many new jobs created during the pandemic are informal. Among the new entrants into the labor force, women were more likely than men to land in informality. Policy priorities include gender neutral reforms to the organization of the labor market, plus social safety nets and policies that aim to address gender gaps. The latter include affordable and quality childcare, gender sensitive social assistance, improvements in women’s access to finance, and efforts to address persistent norms driving unequal gender roles. -
Publication
Ethiopia - Rural Income Diagnostics Study: Leveraging the Transformation in the Agri-Food System and Global Trade to Expand Rural Incomes
(Washington, DC, 2022-06)Ethiopia began the decade on a great run, with high economic growth and significant gains in poverty reduction nationally. But the gains were unevenly shared. Multiple shocks at the beginning of the new decade threaten to discontinue progress and possibly undo most of the gains made in the recent past. This rural income diagnostics (RID) study seeks to inform how to promote growth in rural incomes to accelerate poverty reduction. The objective of the RID is to examine how those who currently reside in rural areas can have higher incomes in the future, which can entail one or more members moving to urban areas. The focus is on income growth that results in higher incomes on average, but also income that is less volatile because of due consideration to effective risk reduction and management, and to ensuring that growth is sustainable. While the RID focuses only on income that is earned by rural households, it is much more detailed in its identification of the constraints because of this narrower focus. The diagnostic provides evidence to validate constraints and key areas of focus in ongoing agriculture and rural policy reforms and other relevant reforms under the Homegrown Economic Reform Agenda (HGERA), elevate the importance of some reforms where immediate action is required, and provide empirical arguments to support important policy interventions where consensus may be lacking or there is policy hesitation. -
Publication
Colombia Jobs Diagnostic: Structural Challenges for the Creation of More and Better Jobs
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-05-05)In mid-2020, the Government of Colombia launched a labor reform consultation process (Misión de Empleo) in response to a deterioration in pre-Covid19 employment indicators and changing economic and labor market conditions. Based on a comprehensive review of Colombia’s labor market performance for the 2009-2019 period, this report seeks to provide analytical underpinnings to this process. At the macro level, the report shows that employment in Colombia is insufficiently diversified relying almost exclusively on job creation in the services sectors. This exposes the labor market to cyclical changes in internal demand that are typical for commodity rich economies like Colombia. At the worker level, the report shows that the economy generates too few formal employment opportunities for those with fewer skills and those living in rural areas, implying low earnings, high rates of self-employment, and high levels of informality. At the firm level, the reports shows that the labor regulatory regime has contributed to strong increases in labor costs with important effects on entry and exit dynamics of firms contributing to a compositional shift towards larger, more capitalized, and more skill-intensive firms. -
Publication
Policy Brief: Economic Shocks and Human Trafficking Risks: Evidence from IOM’s Victims of Human Trafficking Database
(Washington, DC, 2022-04)This policy brief presents the main findings of the report “Economic Shocks and Human Trafficking Risks. The report focuses on risk factors that are expected to increase the vulnerability to human trafficking from and within origin countries such as economic shocks, measured by large, discrete changes to export commodity prices and to GDP. It also explores the role that institutions play through enforcing the rule of law, providing access to justice, and implementing anti-trafficking policies, as protective factors that could weaken the link between economic shocks and an increase in human trafficking. The analysis verifies that economic shocks are significant risk factors that increase vulnerability to human trafficking. In origin countries, economic vulnerabilities, especially those caused by global commodity price shocks, are strongly positively correlated with observed cases of trafficking. For instance, the economic shock produced by a typical decrease in export commodity prices is associated with an increase in the number of detected victims of trafficking of around 12 percent. The analysis suggests that good governance institutions and particularly a commitment to the rule of law and access to justice as well as stricter anti-trafficking policies and social assistance can have a limiting effect on the number of observed cases of trafficking following economic shocks. -
Publication
The Long Shadow of Informality: Challenges and Policies
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-03-08)A large percentage of workers and firms operate in the informal economy, outside the line of sight of governments in emerging markets and developing economies. Widespread informality may hold back the recovery in these economies from the deep recessions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic—unless governments adopt a broad set of policies to address the challenges of widespread informality. This study is the first comprehensive analysis of the extent of informality and its implications for a durable economic recovery and for long-term development. It finds that pervasive informality is associated with significantly weaker economic outcomes—including lower government resources to combat recessions, lower per capita incomes, greater poverty, less financial development, and weaker investment and productivity. -
Publication
Cultivating Opportunities for Faster Rural Income Growth and Poverty Reduction: Mozambique Rural Income Diagnostic
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-03-01)Mozambique’s economy has experienced strong growth over the last two decades, with GDP expanding at an annual average rate of 7.2 percent. However, this growth has been unequally shared and rural areas still lag far behind urban centers in both monetary and non-monetary dimensions of wellbeing. As most poor households live in rural areas, increasing rural incomes is essential to reducing poverty and ensuring the benefits of growth are distributed more equally. Income growth opportunities for rural poor households in Mozambique in the next 5-10 years are predominantly in the agricultural sector. Smallholder farming is the chief activity for most rural households, with income from non-farm sources and migration playing a lesser role and often constrained to specific regions. However, low levels of agricultural productivity, low participation in input and output markets, and high vulnerability to seasonality factors and shocks inhibits the capacity of rural households to increase their incomes. This report proceeds as follows: After setting out the framework and methods in more detail in section two, the following section provides some context by detailing the income, assets, and market engagements of rural households in Mozambique, focusing on a characterization of the livelihoods of the rural bottom 40 percent. Section four discusses the opportunities for growth across the main three sources of rural income (farm, non-farm, and migration). Section five then presents the main barriers to taking advantage of these opportunities, detailing the evidence behind this prioritization for the three most binding set of constraints. From this list of priority constraints, policy actions and investments to address the top three groups of binding constraints are discussed. -
Publication
Subnational Civil Servant Pension Schemes in Brazil: Context, History, and Lessons of Reform
(Washington, DC, 2022-03)Brazil's pension system takes up an oversized proportion of its social protection spending. It comprises of Regime Geral de Previdéncia Social (RGPS), covering private sector workers, and over two thousand Regimes Pröprios de Previdéncia Social (RPPS), insuring public civil servants at federal and subnational levels. While the total membership of RPPS only stands at about 10 percent of RGPS coverage, its spending amounts to almost half of RGPS pension outlays. This paper attempts to present an integrated view of RPPS pension schemes, their influence on subnational budgets, and their interaction with human resource policies. After a brief introduction, Chapter 3 starts by documenting the history of civil service and its associated pension schemes, looking for explanations on how subnational RPPS became so big, dispersed, and difficult to reform. The fiscal consequences of subnational civil service pension scheme expansion and maturation, including RPPS role in the fiscal challenges and policies of the last few years, are discussed in Chapter 4. Chapter 5 attempts to expose important interlinkages between pension and human resource policies and argues for the need of integrated policy approach. Chapter 6 describes the history of previous RPPS reform attempts, while Chapter 7 focuses on the effects of federal pension reform of 2019 on subnational civil servant pension schemes. The paper ends with lessons and policy recommendations for the future. -
Publication
Malawi Gender Assessment
(Washington, DC, 2022-03)The government of Malawi has committed to addressing gender inequality and improving women’s wellbeing. The government has implemented multiple strategic development plans to guide policy creation and implementation. The current ongoing strategic plan is the Malawi Growth and Development Strategy (MDGS) III, which is aimed at alleviating poverty and fostering sustainable economic growth. In January 2021 the government of Malawi introduced the Malawi 2063 Vision, a strategic development plan which aims for low-middle income status by 2030.i To meet the goals set out in Malawi 2063, human capital development, private sector development, economic infrastructure, and environmental stability have been highlighted as critical drivers to be addressed. While the MDGS III and the Malawi 2063 Vision both include a focus on gender equality, this is largely done through a human capital and voice and agency lens, with considerably less focus on how closing gender gaps in the productive economic sectors can boost economic growth and poverty reduction. In the MDGS, gender is placed under ‘other development areas’ and grouped together with issues relating to youth, disability, and social welfare, with outcomes to be monitored including those focused on access to basic services, women’s roles in various levels of decision-making, and gender-responsive budgeting. In the Malawi 2063 Vision, gender is principally discussed under the human capital ‘enabler’ section. -
Publication
Malawi - Gender-Based Violence Assessment: Scope, Programming, Gaps and Entry Points
(Washington, DC, 2022-03)The objective of this assessment is to provide background information about GBV issues, policies, programming, and gaps in Malawi, for the purpose of assisting the World Bank (WB) to 1) consider how to directly support efforts to address GBV in Malawi; 2) inform strategies for integrating attention to GBV in development programming; and 3) understand the extent of GBV response programming. In addition to providing an overview of data on the scope of GBV in Malawi, the assessment investigates: legislative and policy protections related to GBV; systems and coordination mechanisms in place for addressing GBV in Malawi; and GBV response and prevention programming. The assessment analyzes key gaps across these areas of investigation based on inputs from key stakeholders as well as the desk review and concludes with several recommendations for WB to consider assisting in addressing these key gaps.