Social Assistance in Developing Countries Database Version 5.0

The Social Assistance in Developing Countries Database is a user-friendly tool that provides summary information on social assistance interventions in developing countries. It provides a summary of the evidence available on the effectiveness of social assistance interventions in developing countries. It focuses on programmes seeking to combine the reduction and mitigation of poverty, with strengthening and facilitating household investments capable of preventing poverty and securing development in the longer term. The inclusion of programmes is on the basis of the availability of information on design features, evaluation, size, scope, or significance. Version 5 of the database updates information on existing programmes and incorporates information on pilot social assistance programmes in Latin America, Asia and Africa. It also adopts a new typology that distinguishes between social assistance programmes providing pure income transfers; programmes that provide transfers plus interventions aimed at human, financial, or physical asset accumulation; and integrated poverty reduction programmes. This new typology has, in our view, several advantages. It is a more flexible, and more accurate, template with which to identify key programme features. It provides a good entry point into the conceptual underpinnings of social assistance programmes

Moho topography under central Greece and its compensation by Pn time-terms for the accurate location of hypocenters: The example of the Gulf of Corinth 1995 Aigion earthquake

International audiencen this paper we expand over the whole of central Greece, the Moho map centered on the Gulf of Corinth from tomographic inversion of PmP traveltime profile data recorded by several tens of temporary stations. Our approach is based on Pn, Moho refracted waves, from a large regional earthquake recorded by both temporary stations and the permanent Hellenic network. The Moho map shows the large Moho depth under the Hellenides belt. It also highlights the shallower Moho domain towards the Aegean Sea south and east of the Corinth Gulf. The domain of shallow Moho is limited along a NE–SW prolongation ahead of the North Anatolian Fault, from the North Aegean Trough to the western tip of the Gulf of Corinth towards the Gulf of Patras. The Pn time-terms provide corrections for the permanent stations that can be used together with the 1D velocity–depth model for a first-order compensation of lateral heterogeneity and contribute to the accurate and fast location of earthquake hypocenters. As a test we relocated the 1995 Aigion earthquake in this way, using only the sparse data of the permanent stations. Hypocentral coordinates then shift close to those derived by a dedicated dense array deployed after the earthquake, implying improvement of the routine location

Luxembourg: Has inequality grown enough to matter?

Luxembourg experienced remarkable economic performance and employment growth since the middle of the 1980s. Based on the development of the financial sector, this growth benefited massively from the contribution of immigrants and cross-border workers to the labour force. High economic growth led to a rapid improvement in the overall living standard of the resident population. During the same period, income inequality increased too, albeit modestly. Even if the country can still be considered a low inequality country by international standards, this trend is a potential source of concern. This chapter analyses the factors that explain the rise in income inequality between 1985 and 2010 and provides a descriptive account of whether this trend has been correlated with a set of social, cultural, and political outcomes. By and large, the positive impact of the improvement of overall living standards seems to have prevailed over the potential detrimental effects of increasing inequality