During the food, fuel, and financialcrises of 2008 and 2009, the Government and donors foundthemselves without an effective mechanism for channelingassistance to the poor. In 2009, the Government ofTajikistan asked the World Bank to support improvement ofits system of social assistance. The World Bank preparedthis report to inform its technical and financial supportfor improvement of social assistance and also to define aninitial mechanism for delivering benefits to the pooresthouseholds. At present, Tajikistan's system of socialassistance exerts almost no downward influence on povertyrates. This note sets forth the case for reform and thenpresents some specific technical proposals for reforms. Totrace the path to reform, this report starts with anassessment of the present system. The other main socialassistance program is compensation to needy families whosechildren attend school. This program pays benefits toselected households if their children enroll in and attendschool. The size of the benefit is negligible and is judgedtoo low to influence school attendance. An important step inthe reform will be to consolidate the two main socialassistance programs, and if possible, all the programs, andreplace them with a single targeted social assistancebenefit program. This will improve targeting by decouplingsocial assistance from consumption of electricity andnatural gas. This is important since some very poor peoplelive in isolated mountainous areas where they are notconnected to the electricity and gas grids, and thus wouldnot benefit from these compensation transfers. This reportpresents proposals for scoring formulas (drawn fromproxy-means tests) for urban and rural areas, based on dataon the characteristics of households and observable proxiesfor consumption. Empirically, the most important householdcharacteristics for predicting consumption are the number ofchildren, the number of family members, and the oblast of residence.
PDF
download
878987797
028-85220240
