The South African old-age social pension has been much studied by both researchers and policy makers, in part for the larger lessons that might be learned about behavioral responses to cash transfers in developing countries. In this paper, we quantify the labor supply responses of prime-aged individuals to changes in the presence of old-age pensioners in their households, using longitudinal data recently collected in northern KwaZulu-Natal. Our ability to compare households and individuals before and after pension receipt, and pension loss, allows us to control for a host of unobservable household and individual characteristics that may determine labor market behavior. We find that large cash transfers to elderly South Africans lead to increased employment among prime-aged members of their households. Perhaps more importantly, pension receipt influences where this employment takes place. We find large, significant effects on labor migration among prime-aged members upon pension arrival. The pension's impact is attributable both to the increase in household resources it represents, which can be used to stake migrants until they become self-sufficient, and to the presence of pensioners who can care for small children, which allows prime-aged adults to look for work elsewhere.

Focuses on whether and to what extent the pension, the stable source of income leads to change in the labour force attachment of the prime-aged adults in households containing pensioners.

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.

Cash transfers are a key component of social protection policy in many developing countries. Yet many policymakers are concerned that continued receipt of such transfers may have unintended consequences, such as a reduction in labor supply when household income rises. We study this question by evaluating the impact of Pakistan’s Benazir Income Support Program(BISP), a cash transfer program targeted to poor, married women,on male and female labor supply. The BISP was implemented via a mechanism that reliedon a poverty score cutoff to determine eligibility, allowing for the identification of causal impacts using regression discontinuity. We find no impacts on household labor supply in the aggregate. When we break up estimates by gender, we find littleevidence of a changein female labor supply, strongevidence of increased male labor supply, and no evidence of changes to child labor. Hence, policy makers should not be concerned that BISP transfers negatively affect labor supply among recipients.

Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs aim to reduce poverty by making welfare programs conditional upon the receivers' actions. That is, the government only transfers the money to persons who meet certain criteria. These criteria may include enrolling children into public schools, getting regular check-ups at the doctor's office, receiving vaccinations, or the like. They have been hailed as a way of reducing inequality and helping households break out of a vicious cycle whereby poverty is transmitted from one generation to another. Do these and other claims make sense? Are they supported by the available empirical evidence? This volume seeks to answer these and other related questions. Specifically, it lays out a conceptual framework for thinking about the economic rationale for CCTs; it reviews the very rich evidence that has accumulated on CCTs; it discusses how the conceptual framework and the evidence on impacts should inform the design of CCT programs in practice; and it discusses how CCTs fit in the context of broader social policies. The authors show that there is considerable evidence that CCTs have improved the lives of poor people and argue that conditional cash transfers have been an effective way of redistributing income to the poor. They also recognize that even the best-designed and managed CCT cannot fulfill all of the needs of a comprehensive social protection system. They therefore need to be complemented with other interventions, such as workfare or employment programs, and social pensions.

In sub-Saharan Africa, older people make up a relatively small fraction of the total population and are supported primarily by family and other kinship networks. They have traditionally been viewed as repositories of information and wisdom, and are critical pillars of the community but as the HIV/AIDS pandemic destroys family systems, the elderly increasingly have to deal with the loss of their own support while absorbing the additional responsibilities of caring for their orphaned grandchildren. Aging in Sub-Saharan Africa explores ways to promote U.S. research interests and to augment the sub-Saharan governments' capacity to address the many challenges posed by population aging. Five major themes are explored in the book such as the need for a basic definition of "older person," the need for national governments to invest more in basic research and the coordination of data collection across countries, and the need for improved dialogue between local researchers and policy makers. This book makes three major recommendations: 1) the development of a research agenda 2) enhancing research opportunity and implementation and 3) the translation of research findings.

"These two volumes update the earlier Means-Tested Transfer Programs in the United States with a discussion of the changes in means-tested government programs and the results of new research over the past decade. A number of these programs have seen substantial increases in expenditures, including Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and subsidized housing programs. For each program, the contributors describe its origins and goals, summarize its history and current rules, and discuss recipients' characteristics and the types of benefits they receive."--Publisher's description.

The Field of Public Economics has been changing rapidly in recent years, and the sixteen chapters contained in this Handbook survey many of the new developments. As a field, Public Economics is defined by its objectives rather than its techniques and much of what is new is the application of modern methods of economic theory and econometrics to problems that have been addressed by economists for over two hundred years. More generally, the discussion of public finance issues also involves elements of political science, finance and philosophy. These connections are evidence in several of the chapters that follow. Public Economics is the positive and normative study of government's effect on the economy. We attempt to explain why government behaves as it does, how its behavior influences the behavior of private firms and households, and what the welfare effects of such changes in behavior are. Following Musgrave (1959) one may imagine three purposes for government intervention in the economy: allocation, when market failure causes the private outcome to be Pareto inefficient, distribution, when the private market outcome leaves some individuals with unacceptably low shares in the fruits of the economy, and stabilization, when the private market outcome leaves some of the economy's resources underutilized. The recent trend in economic research has tended to emphasize the character of stabilization problems as problems of allocation in the labor market. The effects that government intervention can have on the allocation and distribution of an economy's resources are described in terms of efficiency and incidence effects. These are the primary measures used to evaluate the welfare effects of government policy.