Can Safety Nets and Compensatory Programmes be Used for Poverty Alleviation?

Abstract

Recent years have seen an increasing demand for statistics which would give a better indication of poverty. Such demands were often a reaction to the stagnant economic situation in which many countries in Africa and Latin America found themselves in the mid-1980s, as a result of both external factors and internal policy stances. Adjustment policies intended to rectify the stagnant situation were initially often aimed at stabilising the economy, and contributed in the early 1980s to declines in real incomes and increases in poverty. Monitoring the evolution of poverty with a view to taking corrective measures became part of the various alternative adjustment policies (Cornia et al., 1987; PREALC, 1985). In the African region, the World Bank and the UNDP started a multi-million dollar project to evaluate the social dimensions of adjustment.