Working Papers

Social protection occupies an important place on the international agenda. A growing number of low- and middle-income countries are in the midst of a ‘quiet revolution’, whereby they are integrating social protection into national development strategies (Barrientos & Hulme, 2009). This evolution is supported by international institutions like the World Bank and the ILO, who, in 2015, launched a global partnership for universal social protection (Zelenev, 2015). Yet in many of these countries, the achievement of universal social protection remains a massive challenge. According to the ILO (2017), only 29 percent of the global population enjoys access to comprehensive social protection, while the remaining 71 percent are not or only partially covered. In addition to being underfinanced and fragmented, existing systems of social protection continue to focus on those in formal employment, while excluding the majority that depends on the informal economy (Alfers et al., 2017). This coverage gap is highly worrisome, because people in the informal economy are disproportionately at risk from employment-related health- and income shocks (Chen, 2008)...

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B. Verbrugge

A. Adeline

J. Van Ongevalle

In 2016, the Belgian Technical Cooperation in Benin (BTC-Benin) launched a call for applications to a new program, denominated PROgramme d’appui au développement des FIlières agricoles (PROFI), to support agri-businesses involved in the value chains of rice, cashews, and vegetables in selected regions of the South (Mono-Couffo) and the North (Atacora-Donga). The program consists in providing agricultural entrepreneurs with equipment and materials, as well as in offering targeted technical assistance. Applications could only be submitted by organizations, i.e. groups of entrepreneurs organized into agri-business cooperatives, which could then decide how to allocate the support received among their members. At the demand of DGD, we have designed a randomized impact evaluation of this program and report in this paper about the different stages of implementation, which followed step by step the different phases of program development from the call for applications to the final selection of beneficiaries... (download)

R. Houssa

This paper investigates the possibility of spillovers among Sub-Saharan African (SSA) eurobonds. Twelve SSA countries are examined from January 1, 2015 to June 30, 2017. Following the methodology of Diebold and Yilmaz (2012), we proceed as in Antonakakis and Vergos (2013) to compute both the overall and time-varying total spillover index and directional spillovers using secondary market daily yields. Ours results indicate significant contagion effects among these bonds as, on average, 66.37% of the forecast error variance in our model come from spillovers. The results of the time-varying analysis shows that the total spillover index has been sensitive to major economic events and news announcements over this period. More important, they suggest that less resilient economies transmit more to and receive less from their peers…(download) 

D. Cassimon

This study explores the drivers of secondary market yields of Sub-Saharan African (SSA) sovereign Eurobonds from 2008 to mid 2017. Our results indicate that, beyond global ‘push’ factors, country-specific ‘pull’ factors such as inflation and GDP growth matter too for SSA Eurobond performance. A panel error-correction analysis suggests large heterogeneity in the short-term influence of our global and country variables across countries. We find no significant effect of bond-specific factors on yields when push and pull factors are accounted for. By emphasizing the prominence of country variables, reflecting the quality of countries’ macroeconomic management and their economic performance, our results qualify the common view that SSA countries have little control over their market borrowing costs. (download) 

D. Cassimon