1,721,020 research outputs found
Rethinking survivor benefits
Full text linkThis paper provides a framework for analyzing the efficiency and equity of survivor benefit programs. These programs were originally designed to support families when the main wage-earner died, in an era where women rarely worked, fertility rates were high, and widows were unable to support themselves and their children. Yet, voluntary saving and insurance were often insufficient due to myopia. Mandatory survivor benefits helped to achieve lifetime consumption smoothing for the family and to prevent poverty among elderly widows the group where old age poverty is concentrated. The question is these programs still needed in an era when most women work and fertility rates have fallen and, if so, how should they be designed? The author argues that, even in a world of perfect gender equality, mandatory family co-insurance may still be justified because couples are unlikely to plan adequately for household economies of scale. This leads the cost of living of a widow(er) to be much more than half that of a couple. In addition, some disparity in work and wage patterns of men and women remains in every country. While such programs may benefit both spouses, women are the greatest recipients because they outlive their husbands. However, as currently designed, many survivor benefit programs entail work disincentives and perverse redistributions from women who work in the market to those who do not, from singles and dual career couples to single-earner couples and sometimes from low- to high-earning families. These cross-subsidies penalize women who work in the market and therefore may discourage such work, decrease their income and increase their old-age poverty rates. The insurance goal can be achieved without these negative incentives and redistributions by internalizing the cost within the family rather than passing it on to the common pool and by allowing widow(ers) to keep their own pensions in addition to the survivor benefits.Gender and Law,Economic Theory&Research,Access to Finance,Population Policies,Debt Markets
Indexing pensions
Full text linkPension indexation should anchor the parameters of the pension system to one or more economic and demographic variables to ensure that the system is implemented in a sustainable way, while minimizing distortions affecting important economic choices. Arguing that financial sustainability, incentive compatibility and consistency across multiple government programs are critical, the author examine the many linkages between the various parameters of pension schemes. Finally, the author turn to the cost of the insurance dimension of indexation, and suggest that option pricing techniques could be used to price indexation guarantees, and that this approach may suggest refinements to indexation practice not thus far implemented.Emerging Markets,Debt Markets,Pensions&Retirement Systems,Economic Theory&Research,Markets and Market Access
Bringing financial literacy and education to low and middle income countries : the need to review, adjust, and extend current wisdom
Full text linkThis paper presents a World Bank led and Russia trust fund financed work program to measure financial capability and the effectiveness of financial education in low and middle income countries. The two activities and their staging have been motivated by the lessons of high income countries with financial literacy programs and the deviating characteristics of low and middle income countries. While progress has been made in high-income countries to measure financial capability, there is little robust empirical evidence thatfinancial education can improve it. While applying the financial capability concept in low and middle-income countries looks promising it will need to be adjusted to their characteristic and supported by innovative interventions and rigorous impact evaluation to improve it.Financial Literacy,Access to Finance,Access&Equity in Basic Education,Education For All,Poverty Impact Evaluation
Disability and international cooperation and development : a review of policies and practices
Full text linkThe purpose of this review is to canvas policies and, to the extent possible, practices of major multilateral and bilateral development agencies, aimed at including disability in development. Development that includes disability, as referenced in this review, is understood as development in which persons with disabilities participate as both actors and beneficiaries. It can be achieved by disability specific initiatives, by adding disability-specific components to development programs, by fully inclusive programming, designed to include disability concerns into all development processes, or by a combination of these approaches. While this review does not claim to be exhaustive, it does attempt to provide as comprehensive as possible an overview of policies and practices on disability and development (D&D), both within and among the United Nations (UN) system, and among major bilateral development agencies. It should be noted that this is a dynamic issue and thus many development agencies are either in the process of crafting new disability policies or strategies or are currently reviewing their existing approaches with a view to modifying or amending them. Section two of this report reviews the international legal and policy framework pertinent to the consideration of D&D with particular attention to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) and Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Section three reviews multilateral agencies and structures, particularly those within the UN system, and reviews their existing policies and/or practices related to D&D. Section four includes coverage of regional structures supporting the inclusion of disability indevelopment. Section five identifies bilateral development agencies that, either as matter of written policy or as evidenced through practice, have taken steps to design and implement programs and practices that are inclusive of disability. Section six provides conclusions.Population Policies,Disability,Social Cohesion,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Gender and Law
The Korean case study : past experience and new trends in training policies
Full text linkKorea's skills development strategy has been highlighted as one of the key driving forces of the country's economic development. This paper examines the main features and evolution of this strategy from the 1960s to the present. In particular, it discusses how the skills development policies have contributed to economic development and poverty reduction. The findings in the paper highlight a set of important lessons for the design and implementation of skills development policies, which could be useful for other developing countries.Education For All,Primary Education,Access&Equity in Basic Education,Population Policies,Labor Markets
Results readiness in social protection and labor operations
Full text linkThe main focus of the social protection and labor portfolio is on strengthening client's institutional capacity in the design and implementation of programs, but projects are not well equipped to track progress in this area. Correspondingly, there is a need to strengthen approaches to measuring and monitoring a'missing middle'of service delivery, precisely those areas for which counterpart institutions are responsible during the course of a project. In particular, better measures of the primary functions of social protection and labor agencies are needed, such as identifying and enrolling beneficiaries, targeting, payment systems, fraud and error control, performance monitoring of service delivery providers, responsiveness to citizens, transparency, efficiency, management information systems and monitoring and evaluation systems. New World Bank initiatives particularly standard core indicators by sector and the introduction of results based investment lending call for substantial improvements in the use of monitoring and evaluation (M&E). Impact evaluations are included in about half of projects and should continue to be used selectively and strategically, particularly when the program is innovative, replicable and/ or scalable to reach a broader set of beneficiaries, addresses a knowledge gap and is likely to have a substantial policy impact. Structuring evaluations around core themes with common outcome measures is fundamental to building a global knowledge base on development effectiveness.Poverty Monitoring&Analysis,Poverty and Social Impact Analysis,E-Business,Safety Nets and Transfers,Housing&Human Habitats
Non-performance of the severance pay program in Slovenia
Full text linkCombining information from the firm survey of labor costs with the information about claims filed with the Guarantee Fund by workers whose employers defaulted on their severance pay obligations, the paper analyzes the so-called non-performance problem of severance pay - the fact that coverage, and thus legal entitlement, does not guarantee the actual receipt of the benefit - as experienced in Slovenia in 2000. The findings are threefold: (i) one-third of total obligations incurred by firms failed to be honored and only a small portion of defaulted severance pay claims was reimbursed by the Guarantee Fund; (ii) while both men and women seem to be equally affected, workers older than 40 were disproportion ally represented among those whose severance pay claims failed to be honored; and (iii) among firms that incurred severance pay liabilities, larger and more productive firms were more likely to observe their fiduciary obligations and pay them out. These findings corroborate the weaknesses of severance pay as an income protection program, pointing to the large scale of the non-performance problem and the inequities created by it.Labor Policies,,Labor Markets,Wages, Compensation&Benefits,Social Protections&Assistance
Unemployment insurance savings accounts in Latin America : overview and assessment
Full text linkThe unemployment protection systems that exist in most Latin American economies are generally considered inadequate in terms of providing insurance to workers and are prone to generate stratified labor markets. Recently, research effort and policy interest has turned to Unemployment Insurance Savings Accounts (UISAs) as an alternative to traditional systems of unemployment insurance. UISAs are schemes of individual mandatory savings that smooth income over an individual's life cycle time rather than pooling unemployment risk over the total working population at a point in time. Although this form of unemployment insurance diminishes the moral hazard problems associated with traditional insurance methods, it presents problems of its own. First, it is questionable that these systems provide adequate protectionagainst unemployment risk. Additionally, their effects on the promotion of informal labor markets and their administrative costs are yet to be determined. Finally, the effectiveness as a form of unemployment insurance depends critically upon the performance and credibility of the financial institutions managing the funds. This paper examines the experience of Latin American countries that use UISAs, with the hope of highlighting the problems of the system and identifying areas for future theoretical and empirical work. In conclusion, the overall effect of UISAs depends on a vast array of specific country characteristics and program parameters. The way the system is implemented, existing labor regulation, the extent of the informal economy and the scope for collusive behavior greatly influence the success of these programs. This calls for a more extensive research effort in the area.Labor Markets,,Labor Policies,Access to Finance,Banks&Banking Reform
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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