FDIC Chairman Sheila C. Bair has expressed a desire to determine how safe and affordable small-dollar lending can be expanded and become more of a staple product for all banks.2 Pilot banks have demonstrated that the Safe, Affordable, and Feasible Small-Dollar Loan Template is relatively simple to implement and requires no particular technology or other major infrastructure investment. Moreover...

The present work stems from a desire to combine ideas arising from two historically different schemes of probabilistic reasoning, each having its own axiomatic traditions, into a single broader axiomatic framework, capable of providing general new insights into the nature of probabilistic inference in a collective context. In the present sketch of our work we describe briefly the background con...

In 2003, the Mexican government took a step toward greater parity in its health system. The stubbornly fragmented health sector remains fragmented, but a new health insurance program to fund basic preventive and curative services was created to cover nearly half of the population which had previously been without effective insurance coverage. The “Seguro Popular,” (SP) the medical care componen...

Social Protection Discussion Papers are not formal publications of the World Bank. They present preliminary and unpolished results of analysis that are circulated to encourage discussion and comment; citation and the use of such a paper should take account of its provisional character. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the author(s) and...

I would like to start by emphasizing the author’s effort to make a comparative analysis of the social policy in the Fernando Henrique Cardoso – FHC and Lula administrations. Nilson Costa performs this non-trivial task in an unbiased and analytical fashion while attempting to identify, although in a descriptive way, the paths and decisions which were made regarding social policy by the last two ...

The focus of this study was to analyse the diffusion and challenges of “ICT-induced atypical work”. The term atypical has no value judgement. It covers all the new work forms, different from the classical work pattern of the full time male job, during the whole working life with the same employer at the same place. This classical work pattern is the basis of current labour legis lation, social ...

The Welfare State and Anti-Poverty Policy in Rich Countries This paper is prepared as a chapter for the Handbook of Income Distribution, Volume 2 (edited by A. B. Atkinson and F. Bourguignon, Elsevier-North Holland, forthcoming). Like the other chapters in the volume (and its predecessor), the aim is to provide a comprehensive review of a particular area of research. The aim of this chapter is ...

Safety nets have often been controversial instruments, condemned in some circles as short-term palliatives or even a waste of money. Much recent evidence shows that safety nets not only support poverty reduction but also economic growth. The existence of safety nets encourages adoption of higher income livelihood strategies that are associated with higher, but prudent, risk. Safety nets should ...

The environment is traditionally considered as a valence issue where all political parties endorse the same position and differ only on the degree to which they emphasize it. Our paper challenges this view by arguing that the environment is increasingly perceived as a positional issue. We examine cross-country mass survey data and demonstrate that many voters perceive a trade-off between enviro...

This paper presents a theory of social policy preferences that emphasizes the role of skills. The key to our argument is that individuals who have made risky investments in skills will demand insurance against the possible future loss of income from those investments. Most income is derived from past investments in skills, and because the transferability of skills is inversely related to their ...