Mainstreaming Safety Nets in the Social Protection Policy Agenda: A New Vision or the Same Old Perspective?

Social protection aims to provide a national platform for smoothly transitioning from a chaotic collection of shock responses to an institutionalized system for risk and non-risk management. For the poorest, the transition aims to move away from ad hoc, unpredictable relief to national safety nets that deliver timely, multi-year, guaranteed and predictable transfers. Social protection has to face particular challenges in chronically poor, shock-prone countries where the distinction between the chronic and transitory poor is often blurred. Other conceptual and programmatic issues also need further investigation. For filling these gaps, a research agenda articulated in ten thematic areas is proposed.vulnerability, risk, shocks, social protection, safety nets, Agricultural and Food Policy,

Relativistic regimes for dispersive shock-waves in non-paraxial nonlinear optics

We investigate the effect of non-paraxiality in the dynamics of dispersive shock waves in the defocusing nonlinear Schroedinger equation. We show that the problem can be described in terms of a relativistic particle moving in a potential. Lowest order corrections enhance the wave-breaking and impose a limit to the highest achievable spectrum in an amount experimentally testable.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

On the Edge: The Role of Food-based Safety Nets in Helping Vulnerable Households Manage Food Insecurity

social protection, food based safety nets, vulnerability, food insecurity

Shock waves in thermal lensing

We review experimental investigation on spatial shock waves formed by the self-defocusing action of a laser beam propagation in a disordered thermal nonlinear media.Comment: 9 pages, 12 figure