Managing Work Disincentives in Romanias GMI Program

Concern about reduced work effort can lead policy makers to consider various features of program design and of the balance between social assistance of last resort, unemployment insurance, and contributory pension programs, but rarely implies abandoning social assistance as a policy tool. 

3 Enhancing Safety Net Programs to Promote Household Independence 

Recent discussions about and some innovations in enhancing safety net programs have been aimed at not only providing a transfer, but also other assistance to help households increase their incomes in the near term. Terms such as graduation, emancipation, and pathways out of poverty are used as shorthand for this notion. 

Helping households increase their autonomous incomes is attractive because it 

This section reviews some of the options and issues for program components other than basic transfers, grouping them loosely into two categories enhancements that are explicitly part of the design of a safety net program and enhancements that link a safety net program with other interventions. 

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