Social assistance performance in Central and Eastern Europe: A pre-transfer post-transfer comparison

The anti-poverty impact of national social assistance programmes in eight Central and Eastern European countries is examined using data from the European Union-Survey of Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC). Results indicate that social assistance programmes achieve only limited poverty reduction, while spending a significant amount of their resources on the non-poor. The more extensive and generous programmes achieve higher effectiveness in reducing poverty. Efficiency on the other hand appears to be linked only to programme size and not to benefit levels. Unlike Western Europe, no trade-off between effectiveness and efficiency could be detected

Conducting Meta-Analyses of Evaluations of Government-Funded Training Programs

Government-funded training programs in the United States have often been subject to rigorous evaluation. Indeed, many of these programs have been evaluated with random assignment, although sophisticated quasi-experimental methods have also been used. Until very recently, however, there has been little systematic attempt to use the cumulative information vested in these evaluations to attempt determine which kinds of programs work best in which setting and with respect to which types of client. Meta-analysis-a set of statistical procedures for systematically synthesizing findings from separate studies-can, in theory at least, address these and other topics that evaluation of individual programs cannot. This article discusses the steps in conducting such a synthesis, summarizes the results of three recently conducted meta-analyses of training and welfare-to-work programs, identifies limitations to the meta-analytic approach, and considers ways in which some of these limitations can be overcome. Copyright 2005 by The Policy Studies Organization.