 Thanks very much Finn. It's really an honor to be giving this wider lecture and be honored to be giving any wider lecture But the 20th in particular And it's great to be back in stock home And thank you for coming When Finn and I first discussed her topic for this and some options He very much favored a focus on an important set of policy issues, but a critical focus That's what I'm going to give you today the importance of being critical here is is a natural thing for any researcher to do We're never quite happy with anything but The point of the point of being critical here is is to move the discussion or further And to mobilize thinking in ways that are positive for poverty reduction more broadly to Recognize the limitations of our knowledge as well as applaud our successes when we've had them the topic today direct interventions against poverty is Particularly salient because we're we're seeing across the world. We're seeing developing countries taking up these kinds of interventions in a big way When we look at the record against poverty reduction, it's it's a mixed record I mean the if we focus just on absolute poverty in this picture. I've given you here absolute poverty by by Dollar a day the numbers of people who are poor by that measure are declining Appreciably over the last 30 years We're also seeing rising numbers of people who are relatively poor meaning they're poor by the standards of the country They live in so absolutely poor here means you're poor by a global international standard You judge people by the same real consumption level in different countries and relatively poor means that you're No longer poor by that standard But you're poor by a standard typical of the country you live in and obviously richer countries have higher poverty lines The average poverty line is developing world is around a dollar a day at dollar 25 a day 2005 prices a dollar 90 a day to 2011 prices Somewhere around that that number but across the world we see big differences in the highest poverty line I found in the world is in Luxembourg and it's $43 a day At a roughly the same average income the poverty line in the United States is 13 dollars a day You've got to realize that there are differences the reasons for those differences and that they reflect aspects of poverty that aren't included in this dollar 25 a day line anchored to the poverty lines found in the poorest countries But another aspect of this is important the continuing exposure to to risk Poor countries even in rich countries Employment shocks health shocks agrochromatic shocks a host of things that everyday life is For poor people across the world is a risky venture and we're not just talking about the kinds of global crises that you could get attention in the media We're talking about crises in everyday life Further a realization that you know economic growth is a wonderful thing I mean it's very hard to get sustained poverty reduction without economic growth and that's what's delivered a lot of that Progress against extreme absolute poverty in the world and we should recognize that But we also recognize that it hasn't done much for relative poverty It's a mixed blessing from the point of view of inequality We're seeing inequality rising in half the countries in the world growing countries and equality falling in the other half The way inequality is conventionally measured that the way if we focus instead on absolute inequality the absolute gaps between the rich and the Rich and the poor that's rising in virtually every growing country in the world Absolute inequality not relative inequality, which is about ratios absolutely about differences absolute inequality is rising everywhere Pretty much. There are very few exceptions We're also seeing new evidence that the poorest are being left behind in this process We've got to applaud the success and the success. I show you here is undeniable at least against absolute poverty We've also got to recognize that the poorest of the world are not participating as much in this progress as we would like If you try to measure the average living standards of the poorest people in the world They're barely above biological minima and they've stayed hovering above biological minima over that 30 year period Our success is there are fewer people living near that level But in terms of raising the floor we're making much less success and that's an important objective for social policy as well We're also see losers and gainers we see churning in this process of growth with absolute poverty reduction in the developing world Churning meaning there are winners and losers some people gaining some people losing when we focus just on the average we miss that We miss that churning going on. There's actually very little we can do an economic policy, which will not have losers And we've got to realize that There too is another role for social policy Now we're seeing this new attention. It's it's quite dramatic Really since the new millennium about 2000 There's new attention to direct interventions and and it's formulated. I think quite well in in the SDG 1.3 Implementing I've given you implementing to implement nationally nationally appropriate social protection systems and measures for all including flaws I Had absolutely nothing to do with writing this but I applaud this including flaws I think that was my influence, but and by 2030 achieves to stay as a substantial coverage of the poor and the vulnerable Commendable, but how are you actually going to do that? Developing countries since 2000 have been adopting turning to social protection policies being a big way if you go back to the pre 201990 it was really quite hard to find a developing country with anything you'd recently call a social protection policy or social assistance What I'm calling direct interventions today. That's changed dramatically in fact now It's hard to find a country that doesn't have something however ineffective and weak but something And the growth rate is extraordinary That's that growth rate in that last point here is of 3.5 percentage points per annum in the coverage rate The percentage of the population covered by social protection and developing world. We're seeing an explosion of interest in and spending and Real resources going to these policies So remember we've got 1 billion people are absolutely poor. We've also got 1 billion people Who are in some form of social protection the problem is it's a different 1 billion these two Curves these two sets in to show you this intersection. I'm giving you a rough stylization We've got 1 billion people living in absolute poverty in the world We've got 1 billion people getting some form of social protection now But it's the intersection of these two sets is quite limited And I'm going to show you that in a more rigorous way in a moment But interestingly the intersection gets bigger as countries develop When we look at the poorest countries in the world, it's very little intersection As you move to richer countries, it gets bigger and bigger. I'm sure in Sweden. It's quite large and It's not complete. I'm sure in Sweden. There's also further work to do This is a graph of the coverage rate. This is something I compiled From a data site of the world bank on the coverage rate of social protection policies in the developing world So the vertical axis here safety net coverage for the poorest quintile That's the the blue line here and safety net coverage for the whole population the red line And I've plotted that against GDP per capita for the year of the survey A couple of observations here really two two main things I want to point to One is look at how low the average coverage rates are in the poorest countries Average coverage rates for the population as a whole and average coverage rates for the poorest 20 percent But second point look at what happens to the two curves as GDP increases You move to higher levels of GDP They diverge so richer countries have bigger have greater coverage And as I said before they tend to be relatively better at assuring that those that coverage is reaching poor people But here's our challenge these countries now There's a variance Those are averages But you can see there's a scatter around that and we see that there are Some poor countries that are doing much better in terms of coverage of the poorest 20 percent The the one billion is roughly the poorest 20 percent, right? Much better so there's a variance in performance another interesting thing If we think about today's rich countries and we go back to when they were as poor as today's poor countries And you don't have to go back about 200 years and in some cases only 100 years will do it I'm not sure about sweden. I should be but I'm not But I for western europe if you go back 200 years You're looking at a region of the world that was as poor as sub-saharan africa today We have reasonably objective measures now that Data's not perfect, but it suggests that that's true In the period where today's rich world made all that progress against extreme absolute poverty We saw A rising floor We saw if that progress in lifting people out of poverty came with a rising floor in a way that we haven't seen in the developing world interestingly the developing world is Accelerating out of extreme poverty, but it's doing it in a rather different way and over a shorter period Than today's rich world did it was doing a different way And the difference is a lot to do with the effectiveness of social policy the topic today Okay, that was the prelude the Lecture is now going to critically review the policy issues in this class of interventions I'm going to first try to define the the role of the interventions In a broad sort of way I'm then going to look at economic arguments for and against and I'm going to give you three case studies I pick one from from England, but England when it was poor by today's standards Then I'm going to pick one the two largest social protection programs in the world today in India and China three case studies England's poor laws India's national rule employment guarantee scheme and China's debaub program and those two programs in India and China Orders of magnitude larger than anything else In terms of people population coverage now when you're India and China, it's not too difficult to do that China has the largest social protection program in the world in terms of people coverage Of course 1.3 billion people that's not so difficult Okay, the themes for this talk This really summarizes you I hope you don't leave after this slide, but um, this is really the whole talk There are no sort of magic headlines here, but a series of issues that I think we have to take much more seriously Protection and promotion both are valued, but it's unclear if governments get the balance right Protection and promotion. I'm going to define what those mean. I'm going to use those as the the twin objectives of social policy But are governments balancing those objectives in an appropriate way and the reasons to think that government failures are a problem here Another there is a region of trade-off between protection and promotion You can protect people too much from the point of view of their promotion, but you can also exaggerate that trade-off And I think that trade-off is seriously exaggerated by many critics of social policy So I want to recognize the problem of incentives and you can't Scratch any economists. You get a problem of incentives So as an economist, I've got to take that seriously But I also think that some critics of social policy and generally not serious economists either Do exaggerate the problem Incentive effects are important, but there are many other constraints which are far more important To achieving better social policy in poor countries. And remember this is about Achieving social protection in the poorest places in the world I'm going to argue for also the targeting is a fetish It is something we've got to rid ourselves of in thinking about the objectives of social policy It is one thing that sometimes helps sometimes not but it's become an obsession In thinking about this class of interventions in the developing world Now the point is the information technology can help And there are smarter social policies we can construct now in poor countries and We've got to realize the potential of new technology there And finally evaluation and monitoring are hugely important. That sounds like a A cliche, but it's really important. This last point is actually just as important adapting to evidence We see a lot of evidence and we see a lot of research, but we don't see nearly enough Adaptation to that knowledge Okay, the policy problem twin goals of protection and promotion Let's first think why why do we have poverty? Well in a nutshell these two slides give you the answer First we we've got to realize that there there can be poverty and inequality In a fully competitive market economy the ideal the kind of textbook market economy We learn about or we teach our students can generate Unequal to have unequal endowments we can have problems of low productivity A lack of marketable skills social exclusion geographic isolation debilitating disease environmental degradation are all entirely consistent with an efficient market economy Trouble is we don't have an efficient market economy We've got all kinds of market and government failures that in themselves generate poverty Prominently in those is the very idea of the dynamic poverty trap arising from threshold effects all kinds of ways in which there are minimum thresholds in terms of Wealth in particular human and physical wealth which you need to reach if you're going to be productive Sitting here in this room listening to me. You're probably burning an average of Well, my students at Georgetown when I tell them this they usually come up with a figure of 1300 Calories per person per day, but looking at this audience. I'll give it a little bit extra actually or maybe Don't take it wrong Let's say 1400 That's what you need to do. Absolutely nothing Just listening to me doesn't burn many calories. I hope it doesn't anybody's getting upset, but But you know it doesn't You need to get to that that magic number. It's called basal metabolic rate to be productive To work physical labor requires you get there And that's a threshold effect, but there are other threshold effects too minimum levels of education My students at Georgetown know full well and students everywhere in the world know that you can't get a job with like epsilon of education You've got to get as a minimum threshold of education If you're a self if you're an entrepreneur trying to start a self employment activity in a poor country You've realized that you may need as a minimum threshold of capital physical capital You need to start that enterprise And they and they and we understand from a literature and more theoretical literature economics We understand for well that these thresholds under under plausible conditions can generate poverty traps Situations low level attractors. They're called an economic situations in which people are stuck There's a large More a large increment to their wealth is needed to escape poverty by the same token That also means that there are people who are maybe comfortably well off. They're not in a poverty trap But they can be vulnerable to large negative shocks. They can be thrown into destitution if the shock is large enough That's those are implications of the existence of threshold effects There are other problems too. I call all a call the site is titled market and governmental Failures for important reason. These are market failures But the existence of a market failure implies a government failure The role of governments is to get rid of market failures. So if market failures persist governments are failing Geographic poverty traps very important External effects of living in poor areas Given your pro given your own endowments your productivity may be lower than it would otherwise be given poor infrastructure Negative externalities associated with living in a poor area Also with incomplete markets We have uninsured risk and that uninsured risk is spilling over into production decisions everywhere in the world today Kids are being taken out of school because of risk For all kinds of opportunities for investment are being foregone Crime is often a manifestation of this So in that context Thinking about those as the causes of poverty, let's think about policy Two types of anti-poverty policies and I make this distinction between protection and promotion Was influenced by a book by Jean-Dres and Nomartier Sen Hunger and Public Action, which Came out of a wider research project as I recall the first wider research project, which I was involved in back in early 1980s It came out of it through a sequence of time, but They make this distinction between promotion and protection. I think I'm defining it or in another paper and you know more rigorously, but but I owe it to them protection policy simply means things that Short-term palliatives for assuring that that consumptions don't fall below some critical level Promotion means things that either get people out of traps or raise their productivity You can be poor but not trapped You're at a nice What we call a stable preferred long-run equilibrium. It may be low though. It may be sort of low level of wealth And the problem your problem is productivity There are other some people the problem is a trap. It's they really need a Significant boost to their wealth if they're to get on to a trajectory to their own preferred long-run equilibrium So promotion policies are either about Allowing poor people to break out of a trap or raising productivity Now protection when I started writing this book that you See that the first third of it or so is a history of thought about Poverty anti-poverty policy and I learned a lot from doing that writing that that part of the book One thing I learned is that people have been talking about protection the protection aspect of social policy goes way back ancient Asia and in in both Ancient China ancient India This guy here is is Cotilia the first economist My reckoning 300 BC India What is now called India and Cotilia wrote a book the science of statecraft It's a nice way to define economics And he wrote in this book all the things that the Government needs to do and that included social protection He had had stuff on monetary policy or an amazing book. I mean, it's it's crude by modern standards, but this is 300 BC But other examples and writings in in in China and and in ancient europe Promotion is a new idea This really started probably my reckoning's late 18th century. So we're talking 200 250 years a period when promotional policies Started to become important, but the debates they took ages the debates on promotional policy in europe It took ages Struggles for those policies the labor movement was involved Individuals were losing their freedom or worse in the struggle for promotional anti-poverty policies in today's rich world With economic development, we do see an increasing emphasis on promotion Protection tends to dominate in poor countries and the key question I want to post you today Does protection keep people poor the kind of argument that we hear about from critics of social policy? So I don't think there's any doubt that that's possible You can't protect people too much from the point of view of long-term poverty reduction. So such a trade-off can exist So I'm not going to deny that that possibility. We think of it as like this We've got promotion as an objective protection as an objective And this is some iso social welfare contour. This is just saying along this point. I'm indifferent in terms of the protection promotion so I allow substitution between them And we've got a a set of possibilities for the economy And the existence of this promotion protection trade-off It can be so thought of as such a thinking that the tangents to this function are a linear or negatively sloped There is some trade-off. We can we can We can protect people at a cost to their ability to promote to promote them I think that's likely but I also think it's it has been exaggerated When we look at the debates on social policy, I'll come back to the debate on england's poor laws We see that exaggeration from some of the most prominent thinkers of the time and I think we see it today too The difference probably is that there was the majority of thought back then and it's a I think a minority of thought right now But also with when people debated social policy 200 years ago in place like sweden They really did not have evidence on these things. They didn't know about labor supply responses I'll give you a quote sooner from David Riccardo, which is Striking here, but we now know a lot about this Particularly in the u.s. The country I live Live in the bulk of the evidence in the u.s. Is now pretty convincing That labor respire labor supply responses in particular through work effort to protection policies that exist but they're modest You will still increase people's real incomes. You'll raise their welfare Through through social policy transfers and so on even allowing for the labor supply responses. They're there But they're not huge More evidence and this is a direction for research more evidence is needed in for developing countries on precisely these these labor supply responses because in developing countries We have a big difference the informal sector the informal sector means that the the the the the choice margin becomes very much affected by the opportunities to work in the informal sector When the informal sector is relatively non-existent a very small part of the economy It's not a an option for most people when you have a large informal sector And that's going to change things a little bit and we need more research on that consistent with the kind of work that's been done in the u.s But I think You can also see situations and a large body of researchers consistent with this Which suggests that the tradeoff may not exist For countries that very low when they're very exposed to risk very vulnerable Here the way I've drawn drawn that When we've got people who are who are have very little protection So I mean by vulnerable. They're very exposed to downside risk for them More protection is actually perfectly consistent with more promotion It relieves constraints on their choice that can Constraints that are coming from market and non-market institutions In the short run an unemployed economy it can also mean A gain in agri-affective demand. This was the the point made in in chapter 22 the general theory by John Maynard Keynes that in an unemployed economy The whole calculus of of of incentive effects for socios redistribution the whole calculus flips Now we're going to have poor people with larger high marginal parentheses to consume They're going to consume more out of redistribution than than rich people and that's going to increase when there's Demand of constraint that's going to increase agri-affective demand in the economy and increase output But even in a fully employed economy now realizing there's a host of ways In which this trade-off ceases to exist And may even become a win-win situation. You can have more protection with more promotion I've mentioned some of them credit market failures in combination with diminishing returns to Capital can generate that political economy and polarized societies. We tend to get dysfunctional states Not that I'm thinking of a country I live in at all Multiple equilibria poverty traps I've already mentioned protection from large negative shocks may be crucial for sustained promotion When that threshold exists You may be well above it now, but if it exists you are vulnerable In some sense everybody's vulnerable to large negative contractions They're also neglected constraints. We've I've said incentives need you have to take incentives seriously But we also have to be careful about them. We need evidence and we need to base our assessments on the evidence not on ideology But there are a whole there's a whole lot of Other constraints that maybe are far more important in practice particularly in developing countries and information is a huge one The poor in developing countries are not easily identified Our information here is is quite weak proxy means tests which have become a Technology for social policy in the develop across the developing world now Proxy means tests in my experience pretty poor proxies They really don't identify poor people terribly well both areas of inclusion areas of exclusion Better social protection policy in poor countries is going to require better data and better mechanisms for revealing the data Mechanism design is going to have to take data revelation much more seriously administration weak states Get poor service provision poor governance all of this is People worry about corruption in developing countries a lot, but you know the other side of the coin to corruption is weak states You do you tend not to get corruption when you've got an administrative capability in a country Political economy. I've always loved this expression from larry summers in the early 1990s It's not I don't agree with everything larry says, but I love this one programs. The poor are poor programs and not sure in other words that That if you focus and target interventions too much on poor people You'll lose middle class support and you'll have won't have a sustainable agenda for poverty reduction Political economy, and I'm going to come back to the constraints on political economy a number of times Another set of constraints, which aren't well understood are about flexibility It does appear to be really difficult to achieve state contingent transfers in poor countries the success stories are all about targeting interventions to Poor people but not in a very flexible way in other words the the transfers don't adjust to changing circumstances It gets hard for somebody gets a shock It gets them get it becomes hard to get onto the program somebody Has a windfall gain They'll still be on the program. There's a stickiness we see repeatedly That can come from a number of reasons fiscal stresses to governments. It can be Very hard to accommodate large covariate risks and social policy participant capture it seems to be a recurrent problem And it generates a stickiness and I'll come back to participant capture moral hazard at local level This is something that really is not at all well appreciated, but I think I'm really raising it Well the first I think it's not the first to raise it moral hazard problems Local governments can expect the center to help in a crisis and I'm going to illustrate this in the case studies This is really important because if you're if you're decentralizing social policy as we tend to do in developing countries and We don't really have much option to that often When you decentralize social policy to local governments that think that the center is going to help in a crisis You're going to have a moral hazard problem the local implementing agents may well undervalue protection relative to the center And that's going to be a an issue later administrative capacity for For better social safety nets is going to require the kind of infrastructure that We don't have in most countries, but we're starting to get I mean India is a famous example We've got now I think 900 million people with a biometric identifier in India This is amazing You get when we get to full population coverage in India of this biometric identifier The social policy options are going to change dramatically and that's a very positive thing There are costs along the way and the concerns about The privacy implications, but on the whole I think this is as good news There are many challenges here in making a pro-poor social net politically sustainable and I've mentioned some cases already, but We have to worry about this state and contingent social safety nets that ensure have a broader base of support than the current set of beneficiaries Protection comprehensive protection the kind of you've got in the kind of Nordic welfare model Comprehensive protection is important lesson for developing for poor countries too because comprehensive protection means that people Who don't today or maybe in a normal circumstance aren't going to turn to these programs But the comprehensiveness of the insurance will give it give it give them will let them support it We saw this in Maharashtra in the early 70s and the famine that hit there and there was a very successful intervention by the Maharashtra government Introducing the Maharashtra employment guarantee scheme, which was scaled up nationally in 2005 and we're going to come back to that as a case study But that program illustrates well you got a large intervention of that sort which was was was Feasible politically because you had a broad class of much broader class of people in the society a much broader segment of people in the society who Saw the benefits of the existence of the scheme because they were exposed to risk and they realized it They knew they didn't know they know about the talk about things like poverty traps, but they knew there was a downside vulnerability A large enough shock could throw them into destitution even though today they're normally they're not turning these programs So achieving that political broad base of political support is is is often about providing effective insurance for everybody the universality Of protection can be very important to the sustainability including the scope for promotion Community-based approaches have a lot of promise and but also they they must recognize that they come with Some difficulties too Just like we have participant capture or a more familiar concept is elite capture In community-based interventions and we've learned that that happens, but again, I don't think we should exaggerate it We've also learned that community satisfaction is actually crucial also crucial for the sustainability of social policies Communities in poor places have to feel that this is a right and fair policy And and that's crucial to their support and you will need their support public information campaigns another set of issues that I take take very seriously and I've written writing on a lot now A number of issues here, but most importantly, I think this last point the credibility of any new social safety You know and you say putting in a new social safety and in place It's higher. It's credible if you if you introduce it before you get rid of the old policy Nine out of ten times it's that's not what happens People get rid of the old policy introduce a new policy and there's a credibility problem people don't trust the government Big surprise And they because of that you'll get Resistance you get riots in the street when you take away the The broad-based subsidies on normal goods that we see in most developing countries because they don't trust the government to supply an alternative They may fully accept and be happy with that alternative, but it's not there yet So very important start the new policy have it in place before the old one is eliminated Deal with the cost of that Okay, improving the trade-off social policies are tied to protect and promote and this is really the new direction that A lot of thinking is taking Here the message is is striking Your incentives which have been so emphasized by critics of social policy That the social policies make poor people lazy and dependent and they don't want to save they maybe if you're mouthless Arguing that they have too many children All of these in adverse incentive effects is also positive incentive effects and we can use incentives to develop better policies Um all kinds of ways in which the mech what economists call the mechanism design Can be really important the incentives you build into the social policy Can be very crucial to its success in both protection and promotion all kinds of examples of that self targeting is one of them Subsidies on inferior goods more you can obviously the more you can move subsidies from normal goods to inferior goods the better Normal goods mean goods for which demand increases with income and inferior goods meaning goods for which demand decreases with income So, you know don't have to be an economist to realize that that's that's an important direction for social policy reform If you have inferior goods That's that's the problem in the problem in practice finding inferior goods Workfare is another example where you build mechanisms into the design work requirements that Do two things essentially they discourage non-poor people from participating And they encourage poor people to not participate when they don't need the program So you build incentives into the design of the program to assure that it's that it achieves better protection and promotion Other efforts to improve the terms of that trade-off. Um, this term social investment has has been um Become quite important in the literature And all of these are around the introduction of explicit conditionalities Um, we're going to talk about um the most prominent example But there are others uh conditional cash transfers. This is an idea that um in in Various forms. Um, I found a hint of the idea of quite an explicit hint. Hints a bit is not quite the right word In adam smith the wealth of nations 1780 Um, he understood the idea of a conditional cash transfer He talked about tuition subsidies targeted to poor to poor families But it didn't happen. It wasn't policy for a long long period Maybe in selected places some universities might introduce it and and so on but it wasn't a comprehensive social policy for a long time Some countries my own country australia introduced equivalent of a thing of a conditional cash transfer in the 1940s, I believe or 30s Um And but there are other examples in in in very importantly in the developing world a couple of initiatives Bangladesh's food for education program at about the same time progressor in Mexico now called opportunit artists actually It's called something else now. It's changes its name regularly, but same basic program bolster a scholar in brazil The research on these interventions if everybody ever asks you for an example in which research on social policies influence social policy This is a big time Those policies have been scaled up to 30 or 40 countries On the basis largely on the basis of the research That research has pointed to very important benefits to poor households from these programs The the sustainability of the programs depended crucially on the research findings and the research findings have generally been Quite positive But now our concerns since this is a critical discussion i'm generally A supporter of ccts. I'm not sure about the c and that's one of the concerns the conditions There are concerns about inflexibility we're not seeing the the the kind of state contingent Insurance that we would think is ideal for any social protection policy. We're not seeing that in ccts We're seeing a degree of stickiness in terms of who gets is on the program and who's not We're also concerns about the conditions. Do they really change behavior in a positive way and some evidence that In fact, you can get very similar outcomes without the conditions because those conditions can be costly to poor people You are telling poor people that you've got to keep your kid in school longer than you would have liked to That means that current you're you're telling them to change their intertemporal trade off If you if you take the kid out of school, you've got an income gain Yeah, so you're telling them You're going to take an income loss now And we're incentivizing you to take that income loss i.e. keep your kid in school longer Now the problem part of the problem with that is it's paternalistic. How do we know? The poor families are making the wrong choices here um I think like many economists. I'm very irritated by paternalism whenever I see it You've got to make the case and I don't think advocates of ccts often have made that case And this last point is the problem really on the demand side Maybe you're incentivizing people kids to to stay in school when there's no teacher there There's no textbooks. They don't learn anything all the problems of education and maybe also healthcare on the supply side Whereas the policy assumes that that's all working fine. The reality is very different Another area for improvement making Workfare more productive The work for programs we see across the the developing world Asset creation it rarely gets the kind of emphasis. I think it should get Including in india, which is loves these programs And there's an important There's an important scope for change there But also trade-offs if we try to make work for more productive meaning that you get the required in a work fair program You're required to work For the transfer payments that are made The the the mechanism design that the incentives building to that are intended explicitly to assure that that non-poor people will not take up that work And also that poor people will leave the program when it's not needed Both sides of the incentive argument are present But asset creation may be hugely important asset creation for poor people may be undervalued A way of making work fair more appropriate for promotion is to obviously assure Better asset creation that emphasis has been lacking Targeting before we get to the case studies, and I just want to say a bit about this and The motivation for targeting comes out of the limitations perceived limitations of untargeted interventions And we see that in many ways The classic untargeted intervention is a basic income guarantee And part of the problem why we haven't seen basic incomes basic income is where you give a transfer payment to everybody of a fixed amount Whether poor or not all right, so I'd love to tell you my Georgetown students about the the referendum. It's coming in switzerland this year You've heard about this. They're gonna vote for a uh a cct a trans. It's not a cct a unconditional transfer payment A basic income guarantee no conditions Of two thousand five hundred Dollars u.s. Dollar equivalent per person per month You get that for doing in nothing All right, my choice students at Georgetown Love this idea Two thousand five hundred dollars a month and actually you get it from from year nought It just builds up in an account. The idea is that by the term you're 18 you'll get this big lump sum transfer And now all of social policies are folded under this It's not like a new thing that's added on top of the bill of the old policies. It replaces everything unemployment insurance all of that goes Some people call it citizenship income That's the right of citizenship in the country It's a actually quite an attractive idea and I think it has a lot to say a lot to go for it But one of the arguments people make for basic income guarantees is is dangerously wrong That is that it doesn't involve any incentive effects Well, it's obviously wrong on the income effects because there's an income effect and that's got to Think of that as an incentive effect. It's right in terms of substitution obviously If you if you get the same transfer payment, whatever you do There's nothing you can do to change your transfer payment So that doesn't provide any incentive to do anything good or bad All right, so it's neutral from that point of view, but don't forget the income effect But finally you've got to finance the thing And they're all incentive effects everything else comes into the picture It doesn't it doesn't go away. You go back to exactly the same set of problems that we've always had So it's a little bit deceptive. I think the arguments that advocates of Biggs basic income guarantees make but it should be on the agenda And something to think about as a counterfactual for some existing policies for example Um, in fact, if you think about a conditional, sorry, a Basic income guarantee financed by progressive income tax That is formally identical to Milton Friedman's negative income tax Part of the reason why Biggs are so current in social policy thinking across the world now Is that the left and the right agree very easily on them Milton Friedman's negative income tax is a favorite social policy of the right Across certainly in America, but it has always Has been for a long time But it's also gets a lot of support from the left Although people on the left generally hate it when I point out that it it's formally identical to Milton Friedman's negative income tax Other concerns responsiveness to shocks. It's not going to be very good at protection They find financially affordable basic income may may come at a cost to other things in terms of of promotion out of poverty Other examples of untargeted programs across the developing world. We've still got untargeted Subsidies attached to normal goods Obviously meaning that the subsidy goes to the non-poor the bulk of it goes if it's a normal good You consume more of it as your income rises So you get more of the subsidy has your income rises and they're still common All right, and no way I can see any justification for this I think we're more we replace those sites of policies with smarter policies either targeted inferior goods or Even basic income guarantees the better But the limitations of this whole set of policies the untargeted policies leads to the arguments for better targeting And the idea is very simple. If you think about this picture We've got um incomes of the pete percentile So here on the horizontal axis percentiles of the population and the vertical axis the income of each percentile So it was the 50th percentile Then the point on the vertical axis is the median All you're doing with a perfect targeting the other extreme to universal programs. All you're doing is filling these poverty gaps exactly Here's the poverty line You fill the gap all of those gaps and you calculate the aggregate poverty gap And that's your policy and that's called perfect targeting Any country that does that policy The writer's described is asking for serious trouble Why? Well, as I said, you know, we can exaggerate incentive effects, but but don't ignore them What would such a policy imply? For the incentives of poor people to get out of poverty if that's literally what you do you're doing then you're imposing a 100% marginal tax rate on poor people What's the marginal tax rate on the rich in in sweden? Now anybody 5560 so way lower than 100 Why do I say that? Because if that is the policy if that's perfect targeting if that's supposed to be the ideal that everybody's aiming for then if your income rises by 100 rupees Your transfer payment will fall by 100 rupees if you're poor There you're facing a 100 percent marginal tax rate So why would you work if you don't like work? Most poor people I've Work talk to don't like work. They would stop So immediately the cost of this program will rise to this area There's no point working And it will actually get larger because you'll attract some people who are are above the poverty line you attract them to To They'll see a trade-off. Oh, I work I if I if I work Stop working my income will fall to this amount my income will be a little bit less than it was before But I don't have to work and of course if you if you don't like work If you value both consumption and leisure then you're going to stop now That's just a the classic argument It's an extreme version of the classic argument that social policy critics have always made against social policies and I said don't exaggerate that argument but also Although the evidence suggests incentive effects aren't large When we get to 100 percent marginal tax rates, we're talking about it's unbelievable to me that incentive effects won't bite seriously So this is a bad idea as a policy Budget constraints on the other hand create a another problem We see a bias across all social policies that I've seen toward inclusion errors In other words, they're trying to minimize what errors of inclusion error if you're making an error in social policy Entargeting it essentially means that you're incorrectly classifying a person as poor Error meaning that somebody's getting the program who shouldn't so that means that somebody who's not poor should be is getting the program Now budgets are termed by inclusion errors by minimizing inclusion errors You'll reduce the cost of the program. I'm going to give you an illustration from from from England's old poor laws Exclusion errors on the other hand are no less important and arguably more important to the effectiveness of social policies in practice Exclusion errors are situations where you're incompletely covering poor people You're leaving out Crucially leaving out large numbers of poor people from your policy We're seeing repeatedly a bias towards minimizing inclusion errors and ignoring exclusion errors And I'm not the first to point this out, but it's it's it's alarming Okay, that's the review of all the issues and I point it to what I think are some of the key things to think about Partly to think about in terms of research going forward, but it's all very dry. I wanted to give you some examples from from real life programs Now we could talk about dozens and dozens of programs, but I'm going to take three England's Old poor laws. Well, the Elizabethan poor laws were really remind very intelligent policy Elizabeth the first in England Came up with this idea or her advisors came up with this idea that They would instruct the parishes to deal with their poverty problem They created a law that said that each parish had to deal with its poverty problem had to raise the money But it was mandatory You know, they had to provide transfer payments conditional on certain events Unemployment sickness death of the breadwinner a host of specific disabilities illness, whatever a host of specific Disabilities each one they had to deal with but they had to deal with it See what's a smart policy for the central government? It doesn't come with a big bill for the central government But that comes with a few problems along the way one of them is horizontal inequity if you're a rich parish Poor piece of poor people in a rich parish are going to do much better in this program than Than than in poor people in a poor parish for obvious reasons But no obvious attempted promotion, this was really a protection policy and every time I look through the legislation I look through what was happening Very little emphasis on on Promotion essentially what they're trying to do is deal with state It may provide state contingent transfers to deal with serious events Which were downside risks facing poor people Now this policy been going on for 300 years some economic historians people like solar and others have I think convincingly argued that the england's old poor laws were important part of social stability in england You know the in toward the late 18th century The aristocracy in england was very afraid that the french revolution would spill across the english channel And I think one reason was the old poor laws But the old poor laws were financed who's financing the policy well and the parishes have got a what's their revenue It's going to be property taxes So the land holding classes were we're financing all of this and they were getting more and more worried about it Resistance emerged and economists started to help them with this and here are the inclusions included david ricciardo David ricciardo the undoubtedly the greatest economist of his time But also possibly the greatest exaggerator of his time This is david ricciardo on the poor laws It is quite in the natural order of things that the fund for the maintenance of the poor should progressively increase until it's Absorbed all the net revenue of the country You know I don't know if you're an economist or not, but you know, it's really hard To write down a model a set of a behavioral model would give that kind of property. You know, it's really very hard Amazing exaggeration But of course, he didn't have any data nobody knew about labor supply responses or Responses and savings decisions and so on the behavioral The economics was not there to to inform these things so you could say anything you liked The reforms were dramatic There were these things workhouses which already existed. They started on the 16th century. I think they started in amsterdam The central idea was that if you're poor if you want relief you had to agree to confine yourself to a workhouse You would work there if you're basically incarcerated You'd get support you get your meals and so on You typically be separated from your your family and and you're confined In this place, right? They're trying to control your behavior. Make sure you do all the right things You don't do any of the wrong things with them with the money and resources, but and they feed you and and that was it The idea was explicitly self-targeting if you look at the arguments made They thought this would be magic They would reduce the cost of the the cost of the old poor laws had risen by 1830 to 2.5 percent of england's GDP By about 1830, I guess the the aristocracy was no longer worried that the french revolution would Would spill across the channel Napoleon had been defeated and everything looked okay. So then they made their their assaults on the old poor laws introduced the workhouses Huge contraction in the cost of the program went from 2.5 percent of GDP to 1 percent of GDP within 10 years That's a peter linders calculation Huge success, but what have we done here? How did we get it from 2.5 percent to 1 percent? By discouraging poor people from going to the workhouses I don't believe that was achieved by by excluding Ineligible non-poor people. I think poor people just saw that they didn't want to be exposed to this It was it was too high a price They respected their freedom. They respected they wanted to be with their families You and people realized this there was a social movement erupted at the same time in debate Charles Dickens I'm sure you've heard of Charles Dickens. If you haven't read Oliver Twist, just read the first three chapters it's a great There's a social novel a great description of the of the workhouses and what life is like in the workhouses and This is my favorite picture of Oliver Twist from an old movie where he's asking for for more gruel Can I have more please? But others too, Benjamin Disraeli the head of the the Tory party was a staunch critic Florence Nightingale was criticized the health conditions in the workhouse the debate that erupted over this policy It had really erupted immediately So what does it illustrate what I've just described in almost textbook The kind of policy debate the workhouses are an extreme thing, but the essence of the policy debate is exactly what Experts from developed from rich countries are telling Governments in poor countries finer targeting Make sure that the the the the non-poor and not getting benefits in the program That targeting finer targeting by reducing areas of inclusion That's that's that's a common across the board and we're missing something we're missing really important things We're missing certain costs on participants Actually, I think if you're a genuine utilitarian you'd think it was very ambiguous what you're doing through workhouses And I think the same point is also true of a lot of social policies in in current Developing countries we have to think more comprehensively about the costs We are imposing on poor people of these policies and that's the the important message here The era the emphasis on areas of inclusion undermined the poor laws the new poor laws even as a protection policy second case study The largest work program in human history India's employment guarantee schemes Here's an effort The economics the kind of equations of the policy Are pretty much exactly the same as the workhouses There's no workhouse, but a work requirement is imposed you receive assistance from the state if you agree to work And they the particular form of that guarantee is at up to a hundred days of work For each household per year unskilled Work in public works projects and rural areas the work is provided on demand Pays a peace rate such that you're you would earn the statutory minimum wage rate in agriculture From this from this work Gives equal wages to men for for men and women for the same work That's the policy It was a very successful policy politically people argue or I think credibly that Congress party won the national election because of this policy It had to form a coalition government with the the left But it but it was back into power and nobody really expected it They came up with this policy as a A smart way of winning that election But of course a lot of commitment to the terms of that policy And essentially what they're aiming to do the motivation is is compelling They're aiming to provide insurance to poor people meaning that when they they need work They can get it they ask for it. They're trying to empower poor people to actually ask for something Which is really crucial to their their rationale But the problem is the reality When we look at this scheme It doesn't do Particularly in poor places in India. It doesn't do what it's saying. It does It doesn't guarantee employment. We see lots of rationing on the scheme And we see a limited impact on poverty when we factor in all the costs again Similarly to the arguments about the new poor laws in in England in the 1830s When we factor in all of the costs of the program including the foregone opportunities People join this program, but they don't they give up something They gain obviously But they give up something You've got to think about what that is too Then we've got non-wage costs incurred in in supervision and in setting up the Local bureaucracies for doing this program My own calculations in Bihar one of the poorest places in India poorest states of India suggests that this program when you factor in all the costs The effect of this program is actually no different to a basic income guarantee If I took the same gross budget and just gave it to everybody whether they're poor or not I would have actually slightly larger impact on current poverty That just tells me two things One that those costs are significant, but two That unless the scheme is actually producing productive assets It is not a cost-effective intervention relative to the The options and that actually doesn't just include a basic income guarantee I also modeled an option where I used the same gross budget and I gave it to everybody with a rationing card In my sir in my sample data a rationing card is issued by the government. It's called a BPL card BPL stands for below poverty line So I do a simulation where I take the same gross budget of this program I give an equal amount to everybody with a BPL card that had more impact on poverty On on poverty than the current program That's very disappointing news or why We've got to probe a bit more further than today to understand what's going on And then the process we learn a little bit more about why there's so much poverty in places like Bihar And that in a scheme like this doesn't change that fact The performance issues are all about the capacity of local states to deliver on programs like this What we see in practice in poor the poor of the state of India the less effective it is at implementing this scheme And you see this in this graph on the vertical axis We have here the share of households who are rationed in the scheme That means that they asked for work, but they didn't get it Remember under this scheme it's demand determined if you want work you go to the local village leader to say I need work I need it badly. Please give it to me He's got to organize a project Is you know some digging a tube wall or whatever it is he's got to organize a project to employ you Under the terms of the scheme under these conditions So you've got to actually act upon you've got to act upon this you've got to take an action If you and you maybe With local officials tells you oh too bad. I don't have any more money anymore or I gotta you've got to come back Come back next year When we look to poor states of India we see this repeatedly They are rationed heavily Lots of people who want work are not getting it under the scheme And the poorer the state on the horizontal axis here. I have the headcount index of poverty The poverty rate percentage of people living below the official poverty line That's dramatic This is a simple performance indicator. This is an employment guarantee scheme The idea is that guarantees employment gives employment to people who want it So that's a performance issue that is striking. This scheme works less well in poor places. Yet. It is an anti-poverty scheme Why is that? Because places like be hard do not have the capacity to implement this scheme And that is manifest in rampant corruption on the scheme And a lot of dysfunctionality and in the end a lot of poor people who want want work, but can't get it How are you going to change that two things or they're also the causes of the problem Poor information is one of them I demonstrate this in a survey we did of 3,000 households in Bihar A very very carefully constructed survey. It's not just my observations from Fieldwork and but this is an observation from fieldwork. This is a total Qualitative observation this is the public information about the program In a poor area of southern Bihar that I was working in for the fieldwork It's a it's a not an easy area to work I mean I tried to go there two years earlier and I was told I'd be kidnapped or killed It was just a matter of which it's a violent place. It's it's not A very safe place But this is The public information program It actually in reggae is the scheme here and this guy here is holding a job card And he's got this big smile. He's happy. He's got a job card. All right this is Now, you know one problem with this is that public information program is you have to be literate for a start 50% of the population are illiterate adult population It's clearly not very effective that poor information means that many poor people are unaware of their rights under the scheme So we decided to try and change that we made a movie It's called be regs the movie We decided on the basis of focal groups We decided that we needed an intervention that would capture people really Suck them in so he wrote a script With a love interest we have everything in this story a fictional story We're pulling all the strings we can to try to teach people their rights under the law to replace this awful banner With something that would work And this is a screenshot from the the movie. But if you go to my website, you can see the whole movie you have to Understand hindi or the B Harian version of hindi But you can go watch the 25 minute movie. So this guy comes back from partner He's a rickshaw while in partner. He's coming back to see lives in the village. He's coming back to see his family He doesn't see any little daughter for ages and he's in his wife and we You know the expression of violin and you know, it's all going there's no violin. We couldn't actually afford a Song and dance act but we did just about everything short of a song and dance act and repeatedly through this We're just telling people these are your rights. You are under the law. You can do this Right now we found the movie really worked in in terms of raising awareness But it didn't work in change in change in terms of changing the reality reality people became much more aware of their rights We did this we took the movie to a randomly selected 40 villages in our survey and we used a hundred villages as the controls And we looked at the effects of the of the movie on people's knowledge We give them a quiz On the the terms of the scheme and we showed significant impacts on their knowledge. So great But it didn't change the reality. They were still being rationed We found a bit of an increase in the wage rate. There are less a bit less exploited the wage rate has Typically you'll get about a 10 20 percent cut off the top from a local official a little Pricey pays for his help You reduce that so you get a little bit better about extra five rupees a day if you're already on the scheme, but not much else Because of the second problem the supply responses In poor places. This is coming down to two essentially two problems One is local costs local cost of delivery All kinds of costs here that are not always evident But if you go and look and you see them local administrative possibilities in poor areas skilled labor is really scarce Part of being a poor area is that skilled labor is scarce And that actually means to administer a program like this. You you I found in partner in the sector of real development I found there may have been others but I could find only one person who is capable of doing the excel spreadsheet to report On the program back to deli administrative capacity is weak That comes with being a poor area and that means that there are huge costs to implement a scheme like this that one person was very busy As you can imagine But there's another set of problems that people try to Reduce corruption on this program in a situation in a naive way They try to do it by increasing the marginal cost of being corrupt. How do you do that? You you increase the penalties in in this part of India we hear often hear expression expression millionaire mukia A millionaire mukia is a local village leader who is a millionaire and in in rupi's but Out of the scheme Out of the money he's making from the scheme Okay, but millionaire mukia is if you you're if you're not careful you could end up in jail The government is survey is a surveillance mechanism. Uh, there are fines There are there's a probability of being caught all of that is increasing the marginal cost of being corrupt But you're facing a rising marginal cost of being corrupt. Why it's a complicated scheme The more you employ people the more projects you open up The higher the cost to you you've got to bring more people into your network You've got to Share the bribes across the largest set of people You may have to bring in the district engineer the sub punch the A bunch of people and you get outside your comfort zone as a local leader You're comfortable with a certain number of people you trust them But as you expand the program more and more people have got to be brought into it The way we say that is if you've got a rising marginal cost Of corruption in the program If you've got a rising marginal cost of corruption in the program then everything the government's doing To reduce corruption is creating the rationing and the poor performance in poor areas You see that very simply. Here's the here's the Marginal cost of corruption what the government is doing is shifting up that cost there This is the level of employment on the scheme. Uh, this is cost or benefit We think some say decreasing marginal benefit or concert marginal benefit So what is the government doing? Tightening up in the scheme increasing the penalties is going to reduce the amount of employment provided by the scheme It's going to contract the scheme. It's going to increase the amount of rationing The scheme is going to and that's why be higher is way up in the top of that diagram before Precisely because the government is fighting corruption on the scheme because it's so worried about corruption in the scheme And be hard in the millionaire and mackiers The way you fight corruption on this scheme is make it impossible for poor people to be exploited this way You've got to change Fundamental things in the in the society in these villages that and if you don't change those things This is not going to work So my conclusion on Enregar at least in the parts of India where Enregar is needed the most Poor states of India be higher in particular, but elsewhere My conclusion is that it's well under the frontier going back to my trade-off argument Promotion and protection Enregar is sort of well underperforming from both points of view With others I've written a book not this book a earlier book last year With very specific recommendations a whole lot of very detailed things that have to be done to fix this program And I argue if you don't fix do those things Dump it Turn it all into a basic income guarantee or just use the bpl cards and give out the cash Last china's debauch program very quickly here. I just have to mention debauch because Although it's the largest cash transfer program in the world We know very little about it. There's only me and about five people in the world who seem to be researching debauch Partly problems of access to data problems of working in china. It's not the easiest place to work From some points of view But it's it's a great program a very interesting program Why it's really interesting to an economist is it appears to be a very bad idea What debauch is doing is literally Perfect targeting that's what it claims the legislation is is trying to do this Everybody gets if you this is the debauch line remember my drawing before Now we have the debauch poverty line and it's a different line in each city So they learned from I have no evidence that they'd read anything about the old debate debate in the 1830s in England But they they certainly seem to have learned from the old paul laws in england That the parishes So deal with their poverty problem themselves Here it's let each city set its debauch line and they had to bring everybody up to that line They had to fill all the poverty gaps So if the debauch line is such and such in your city, which is determined by your city The gas city government had to give everybody with income below that line exactly enough to fill the poverty gap So when I first heard about this it appeared is first appeared in the late 1990s I thought my goodness They're going to create they're going to create a poverty trap A public based poverty trap Research continued and the story unfolds a bit like the story about the national employment guarantee scheme in India The reality is very different First thing we find areas of inclusion are modest This is the best to my knowledge the best targeted in the narrow sense Of reducing areas of inclusion making sure that non-poor people don't get the the benefits This is the best targeted program in in the developing world There's a compilation by Cody Grosh and Hodnott of various Social programs and they measure targeting performance in terms of reducing inclusion areas So the share of benefits going to poor people across all these programs and and be hired as a debauch program is just Way better than any of them. So excellent targeting performance It really administrative capability. It is China administrative capability is excellent But coverage is a huge problem First observation now, okay, what do we do with that? I was asked to advise the ministry of civil affairs and in China and what do we do? My advice is well, if it's a poverty trap, don't expand the program Coverage is a big problem. Obviously, we would think to expand the program to expand coverage coverage of poor people It's not reaching enough Of the target population But if it's a poverty trap, the last thing you want to do is expand it I mean Do something else, but you know don't Expand the thing you're just creating an even bigger poverty trap With 100 percent marginal tax rates on poor people Higher than any tax rates on any rich people But is it a poverty trap when we turn to the evidence? It all looks very different The benefit withdrawal rate on paper is 100 percent The reality much much lower This is quite a difficult thing to to work out and this is the source This is where I document the evidence in a paper last year But the benefit withdrawal rates on this scheme are not 100 percent Actually more like five to 20 percent What is happening? Well, it's remarkable Local and we saw this in the field local implementers of the scheme Are recognizing the incentive problem and they're smoothing the benefits at a daily daily basis We saw this in qualitative work if if a poor household we've got a job They would not cut their debaub benefits. They'd say The local official would tell me this. Oh, no, we shouldn't do that They didn't talk about incentives. They didn't talk about marginal tax rates But essentially they recognized the incentive problem. They said, well, let's smooth the benefits Well, we'll keep them in the program for another three months or so This was local implementers who understood Incentives and we're essentially implementing a different program to the central government's program Another way of thinking about this is we have participant capture in the program Local officials they kept a they've got a kind of client base the people in the program And they stay in the program It's not a bad necessarily a bad thing, but it is participant capture It lacks the flexibility people getting on to the program when they need it People leaving the program when they should it's the other extreme 100% marginal tax rate is too high The marginal tax rate on this program the benefit withdrawal rate Same thing marginal tax rate benefit withdrawal rate the same thing, but the the benefit withdrawal rate is too low The program is is not providing The program is biased towards promotion away from protection If anything the center is the opposite central government is biased towards protection away from promotion Now you can think of why that might be the case central governments Are going to bear significant political costs of crises and and this is china which suffered the worst famines in human history Because of policy failures and the great leap forward. They know the history too Crises are bad news instability Keeping the commerce party in power is is crucial Obviously, so they have probably a bias towards Protection Local administrators have a bias towards Promotion probably realizing that the center will come in and help moral hazard is may be part of the story So if anything we're going to go back to our characterization of the promotion protection tradeoff Debout program. I'd argue we have a local the actual program What's actually implemented by local officials and we have the center's legislation what is it supposed to do And this is the and I'd argue the optimal sum between the two and I'm not just guessing at that. There's actually research by Good economists. There was a very important paper by Ravik Kanpur and others On working out What the optimal tax rate should be on a program like this and it's somewhere around 50 to 70 percent It's certainly not a hundred percent But it's certainly larger higher than the current program Conclusions then are two lessons from all of this These are lessons for social policy reform and the ones that I carry forward and from from this preparing this lecture First focus on protection promotion not finer targeting. Let's let's just put this in its place Targeting can help sure Sometimes maybe but keep your eye on the ball. What's the objective here? It's not finer targeting It's reducing poverty and they are not the same thing There are all kinds of costs of in reality that come into the story and there are information problems Asymmetric information all kinds of measurement areas in our data or when we say that something's well targeted We're using data that's not designed for that purpose and as has measurement errors are huge Lot of problems there as they've emphasized a trade-off can be expected Look for it You design the program badly you will will have a trade-off Your face could face as a very severe trade-off But it's often exaggerated by critics second law is lesson strive to improve that trade-off Try to strive to achieve More protection for given promotion. I hear I think here the the social investment approach is encouraging But again, it's not a magic bullet. We've got to think about that in a comprehensive way Challenges here involve achieving greater flexibility. We that is a recurrent problem. We're not seeing A lot of progress there And also we're seeing a lot of programs which really are too complex For the setting we're talking about part of being A poor place is as I've emphasized administrative capabilities are weak and you try to do a complex program You'll have perverse effects that rising marginal cost of corruption the fact that that that Fighting corruption is actually making the program work work less well and then in a narrow sense of Assuring that people get work when they need it That's that's an important lesson. It's a lesson about tailoring social policies to administrative capabilities in the context You've got to have another development agenda, which is to expand administrative capabilities Making governments more capable in poor places But it's in the short run, you know, at least don't try to imagine they can do all kinds of stuff that they can't do and finally monitoring and evaluating and Monitoring and evaluating is what gave me all of the the research that I talked about it Well, that doesn't include the old poor laws debate, but in terms of the research that's been done on social policies It's been hugely important and influential going forward You can read more about this in the book I'm not advertising the book, but There you go. It's a nice book I think so Um, thank you for your attention