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The paper examines the effect of family transfers on child poverty in Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Family transfers are defined as to include non-contributory child benefits, contributory family allowances and tax credits or allowances. The drive to reduce child poverty is of particular interest in southern Europe, where public support to poor families with children is often meagre or not available at all. The paper uses the European cross-country microsimulation model, EUROMOD, to assess the distributional impact of existing family transfers and to explore the scope for policy reforms, before it concludes with a discussion of key findings and policy implications.

This chapter presents a quantitative description of the living conditions in a slum area of an intermediate Argentinean city during the outburst of the Covid-19 crisis using primary data collected four months after the lockdown measures had been introduced. The sample represents 1,500 households which claimed food assistance over this period, and whose deprivations and presence of young members are similar to that of 13% of the city’s population and 23% of the country’s population. Rough estimates suggest a disproportionate drop in employment and a disproportionate increase in unemployment in the area compared to those registered in the aggregate of the main urban agglomerations of the country. Cash transfers implemented during the lockdown, together with in-kind food aid from schools, the municipal government, and the church with non-governmental organizations, entailed a substantial average increase in the coverage of the cost of the basic food basket. However, non-trivial fractions of households were not covered by any of the main cash transfers. Also, and despite efforts, food insecurity could not be avoided. Considering the similarity of the sample to significant fractions of the country’s urban population, the deprivations experienced over 2020 by groups which were already in poverty before the Covid-19 arrival, raise alarms on the future well-being of these populations, especially for infants and children. Novel policies are required, addressing the various critical needs in an interconnected way, integrating the different stakeholders that have proven to be key in assisting these households during such an unprecedented covariate shock.

Population aging in many countries has become a fundamental concern of public policy. One reason is fears that increasing numbers of elderly will place disproportionate burdens on their children in order to fund public pensions and health-related services. This analysis first discusses basic principles for assessing this question of intergenerational fairness. It then applies an empirically-based overlapping cohort dynamic microsimulation model for a quantitative analysis of the flows of taxes and cash and in-kind transfers for successive birth cohorts. The simulations cover both exogenous factors – specifically trends in life expectancy and the strength of the economy, and policy-related factors – specifically raising the age of entitlement to public pensions from age 65 to 70, and price versus relative wage indexing. The analysis concludes, among other points, that intergenerational differences are significantly smaller than intra-generational variations, and that the parents of the baby-boom generation are likely to benefit from the largest lifetime net transfers of any birth cohort from 1890 to 2010.

Malawi is a nation with a population estimated at 13.1 million (Government of Malawi, 2008). It was ranked at number 166 out of 177 countries in the 2006 Human Development Index of the United Nations Development Program. The population is predominantly rural (83 percent), and the economy is highly dependent on agriculture, mainly smallholder farming and fishing. The per capita gross domestic product in 2006 was $160, down from $210 in 2001, and the annual national budget is approximately $1.3 billion (for 2007/08).

Terrorism finance (TF) has been aptly termed as the lifeblood of terrorism. TF provides funds for terrorist activities. Terrorists mobilize funds by using the formal banking system, informal value-transfer systems, hawalas, Hundis, and the oldest method of asset transfer. They may raise funds from legitimate sources, such as personal donations and profits from businesses and charitable organizations, as well as from criminal sources, like the drug trade, the smuggling of weapons and other goods, fraud, kidnapping, and extortion. Countering the financing of terrorism is a far greater challenge throughout the world. The objectives of the chapter are as follows: (1) to identify the different sources of terrorism financing, (2) to analyze various ways of moving terrorism funds globally, and (3) to examine the initiatives taken to counter terrorism financing.

European Union (EU) member states are dedicated to a set of sustainable development goals, among them to: (1) promote well-being for all at all the ages and (2) achieve gender equality. This chapter uses the National Transfer Accounts (NTA) methodology that enables comprehensive measurement of intergenerational transfers, both public and private, and differences in the gender equality promotion among the countries. Our analysis is based on the fully comparable NTA results for 25 EU countries from 2010. The authors perform cluster analysis based on five indicators, measuring the importance of different types of age reallocations and the differences in gender equality promotion among the EU countries. Since the economic life cycle (showing the level of dependency) and its financing strongly depend on country-specific institutional and cultural settings, the authors link their results with the typical welfare regimes’ typology. The authors end up with three different groups of countries showing a clear north–south division of countries.

The Kaldor–Hicks (KH) criterion has long been the standard for benefit–cost analyses, but it has also been widely criticized as ignoring equity and, arguably, moral sentiments in general. We suggest the use of an aggregate measure (KHM) instead of KH, where M stands for moral sentiments. KHM simply adds to the traditional KH criterion the requirement that all goods for which there is a willingness to pay or accept count as economic goods. This addition, however, runs up against objections to counting moral sentiments in general and non-paternalistic altruism in particular. We show these concerns are unwarranted and suggest that the KHM criterion is superior to KH because it provides better information.