Improving research infrastructure on social assistance

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Since the turn of the century low and middle income countries have introduced or expanded programmes providing direct transfers to families in poverty or extreme poverty as a means of strengthening their capacity to exit poverty. The rationale underpinning these programmes is that stabilising and enhancing family income through transfers in cash and in kind will enable programme participants to improve their nutrition, ensure investment in children's schooling and health, and help overcome economic and social exclusion. The expansion of antipoverty transfer programmes has accelerated. Estimates suggest that around 1 billion people in developing countries reside with someone in receipt of a transfer. As would be expected, the spread of social assistance has been slower and more tentative in low income countries due to implementation and finance constraints and limited elite political support.Antipoverty transfer programmes in developing countries show large variation in design, effectiveness, scale, and objectives. In most countries, there are several interventions running alongside one another with diverse priorities and designs, and often targeting different groups. In many countries social public assistance programmes work alongside social insurance programmes for formal sector workers and humanitarian or emergency assistance. Social assistance focuses on groups in poverty, provides medium term support, and is budget-financed. The spread of social assistance in developing countries has revealed significant gaps in the knowledge, for example as regards their effectiveness, reach, and sustainability. Comparative analysis is essential to fill in these gaps and improve national, regional and global policy. For example, achieving a zero target for extreme poverty, as has been suggested in the context of the post-2015 international development agenda, would require effective and permanent institutions ensuring the benefits from economic growth reach the poorest. Social assistance is essential to achieving this goal. This research project focuses on improving research infrastructure on social assistance, in terms of concepts, indicators and data. This is urgently needed to support comparative analysis of emerging social assistance institutions. The project will identify indicators to assess social assistance programmes and will collect information on these for 2000 to 2015 for all developing countries. The database will be made available online to researchers and policy makers globally. As part of the project, the database will be analysed to examine patterns or configurations in social assistance programmes and institutions. Our interest is in identifying ideal types, broad features of social assistance programmes or institutions which enable reducing the large diversity of programmes and interventions to their core characteristics. These ideal types are social assistance regimes. Further analysis will test for potential combinations of political, demographic, economic and social factors linked to specific social assistance regimes. This analysis will allow us to examine what conditions can help explain the expansion of social assistance in developing countries; what factors influence the specific configuration of social assistance institutions in different countries and regions; and what conditions are needed for their effectiveness and sustainability. This research will throw light on the contribution of social assistance to the reduction of poverty and vulnerability and to economic and social development.