Publications

After more than a decade of coping with transition challenges in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the need for the reform of family and child welfare systems has been widely acknowledged. The mindset is changing, policies are increasingly embracing new directions, reform efforts are underway, but the lives of hundreds of thousands of poor families with children have yet to improve. Every year a large number of children are still at risk of being separated from their families and being placed in institutional care. Through 'Changing Minds, Policies and Lives', UNICEF and the World Bank have teamed up in an effort to increase the understanding of the essential challenges of the system changes, and to propose strategies to advance the reform of child and family services. The results of the joint work are the concept papers and corresponding tools that suggest how to change three important system regulators, decision making, standards and financing.

The quality of care children receive, their learning experiences and relationships, are critical in shaping their future. This is particularly true in their first years of life. Quality child protection services play an important role in enhancing learning and achievement throughout children’s lives, in providing more positive lifelong opportunities and outcomes, and in reducing poor health in adult life. The key to a high-quality child protection system is to have clear, agreed standards based on evidence of best practice and effective systems to implement and monitor them. Given the importance of promoting quality, this paper provides a framework for designing tools to specify and use standards as part of the reform of the child protection system. This is to ensure that, wherever possible, families are supported to care for their children themselves.

One of the legacies of the command economy in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union has been a system of social protection for vulnerable individuals which focuses on institutional care.This paper provides a framework to help countries re-orient their financing systems for social care, so that they can implement a change programme for the social care system. The ultimate objective is for countries to use more family-based and inclusive care programmes, and use institutional care as a last resort, thus supporting families to care for their vulnerable members rather than place them in residential care. Family-based and inclusive care are generally more effective in meeting social needs and are, at least on a unit cost basis, less expensive. Changing the financing system will not automatically reduce institutionalization.

During the last three decades Spain has undergone a major political and socio-economic transformation. Over the same period, indicators such as average welfare levels as measured by real disposable per capita income or expenditure on social protection have shown a signifiant net rise; this growth has occurred in parallel with both an increasing flexibility in the labour market and a dramatic jump in unemployment. In contrast with many other European countries in which relative poverty has been tending to increase in recent decades, poverty in Spain has been slightly reduced. The effect of these changes on the economic welfare situation of children has not been explored. The aim of this paper is therefore to provide evidence on the static and dynamic aspects of relative poverty among children, namely, its extent, evolution and persistence.

The 1980s witnessed a number of important shifts in fiscal policy in both the developed and the developing world. These reforms were carried out in response to such growing pressures as the debt crisis, which were hampering the basic operation of taxation and its overall performance in terms of revenue, fairness and efficiency. This paper examines the Asian experience of this process of change - identifying key reforms and assessing their effectiveness. Particular emphasis is placed throughout upon the equity implications of the various tax systems.

This paper focuses on the equity aspects of tax systems in Latin America. Aftrer reviewing quantative characteristics regarding the level and composition of tax structures, the paper analyses recent country experiences of tax reforms and attempts to show how the design of instruments has coped with distributional issues in taxation. Policy proposals to promote a more progressive distribution of the tax burden are presented, paying due notice to institutional and administrative constraints that characterise the region's tax systems and avoiding conflicts with other functions of the tax systems - revenue generation and economic efficiency.