The Case for Safety Nets

Safety nets deserve a role in development policy in all countries. They mitigate extreme poverty through redistribution of resources they help households invest in their future and manage risks and they help governments make sound policy decisions in macro-economic, trade, labor, and many other sectors. 

Safety nets are never the whole or suffioient answerto poverty reduction or risk management. They must operate within the existing policy context and be balanced with existing or planned safety nets, sooial insurance, and other social or poverty alleviation policies. No single presoription fits all oircumstances. The mix of support to the chronic poor, the transient poor, and vulnerable groups will be complex, and, until the safety net is adequate for all, the subject of difficult and controversial triage decisions. 

FOR PROJECTION AND PROMOTION THE DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTADDN DF EFFECTIVE SAFETY NETS 

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This definition needs some explanation. The viewpoints mentioned in it represent the stakeholders concerns about the system (the trustee) under consideration. A viewpoint can represent an individual user who decides about involving herself/himself in the co-operation with the system depending on its trustworthiness (consider for instance e-commerce or e-health applications) or can represent a class of users. An example of a latter is a non-profit institution which assesses a given Web service on behalf of its users (this is what Health On the Net foundation [1] does for the users of e-health services). A viewpoint can be highly formalized, for instance in the situation where the criteria to be met by the trust case (to consider it satisfactory) are documented and supported by regulations (like in the case for safety critical applications [2]) or are documented and widely accepted (which is the case for security critical systems [3]). For some viewpoints satisfactory may mean convincing and valid whereas for some other satisfactory may have more subjective interpretation. 

In designing and implementing effective safety nets, the big picture and the details have to fit together and so must both be kept in mind simultaneously. The traditional metaphor for this is to look at the big picture and then to zoom in on some detail within it. In the case of safety nets, the more appropriate metaphor might be a picture in a picture computer display where the big picture is kept crisp while the display with the finer detail is equally crisp as well. This presents something of a dilemma in writing a book which must be presented, if not necessarily read, linearly. 

The limited evidence available suggests that for safety net programs with moderate generosity, the increase in income or consumption is close to the value of transfer. In the case of five of... 

Moreover, harmonized data and information regarding accident causation, across a number of European countries, was used, exploiting the in-depth Safety Net Accident Causation Database collected from six countries following a common methodology and, importantly, a detailed process for recording causation is called the SafetyNet Accident Causation System (SNACS). This resoirrce includes 1,006 cases split between Germarty, Italy, The Netherlands, Finland, Sweden and the UK and was used to produce some basic causation factors. 

The major features of treatment guidelines concern indications for treatment, the particular treatments to be used, and in the case of biomedical risk factors, target levels following intervention. Figure 2 shows how these aspects are informed by clinical trials. In particular, net benefit depends on the absolute risk reduction (related to both baseline risk and relative risk reduction) and safety of the treatment. The greater the risk of the patient group or individual for future events, the greater is the absolute risk reduction with therapy (Fig. 3). Health policy decisions are informed not only by outcome data but also by cost-effectiveness analyses, Cost-effectiveness in turn relates to the absolute benefits that are observed. 

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