Social Assistance in Albania. Decentralization and Targeted Transfers

Harold Alderman

Working Papers from World Bank - Living Standards Measurement

Abstract: Albania provides a small amount of social assistance to nearly 20 % of its population through a system that allows a degree of community discretion in determining distribution. This study investigates the poverty targeting of this program. It indicates that relative to other safety net programs in low income countries, social assistance in Albania is fairly well targeted to the poor. Moreover, the poverty targeting exceeds that which could be expected on the basis of proxy indicators of targeting alone; communes appear to be using local information. Nevertheless, a large number of poor are excluded from social assistance. Moreover, the system is hampered by the absence of a clear objective criterion to determine the size of the grants from the center to communes and limited information that might be used to implement this criterion.

Keywords: ALBANIA; SOCIAL SECURITY; DECENTRALIZATION (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H53 H55 I38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 1998
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fth:wobali:134

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