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AbstractMotivationDuring the 2010s Honduras reported some of the highest rates of violent urban crime anywhere in the world. Before the 2010s, the government tried to control crime using heavy policing and sentencing (la mano dura), but with little apparent effect on alarming and rising rates of urban crime. This led to a switch to working with communities to make urban spaces safer, to change attitudes among young people vulnerable to perpetrating and suffering violent crime, and to encouraging secondary school students to remain in school.PurposeThe article assesses the success of the 2013–2019 pilot,Ciudades Seguras(Safe Cities), in three large municipalities. The project aimed at integrating crime prevention, social investment and municipal capacity building across the national and subnational administrations.Approaches and methodsThe project was designed with no regard to impact evaluation, without an adequate baseline, without controls. Hence, we develop a simple ex‐post cost–benefit analysis (CBA) that updates an ex‐ante CBA. Our approach has two advantages: (1) it provides rigorous estimates of the project's impacts from assessing counterfactuals, data, and plausible individual and social benefits; and (2) it helps assess the quality of the original ex‐ante CBA estimates.FindingsReliable data on project impact is incomplete. Two findings, however, are striking. In the three cities, homicides fell dramatically from more than 850 per annum to below 500, against a projection of rates rising to 900 per annum. The other is that, contrary to programme plans, school dropout rates actually increased. The value of fewer murders outweighed disappointments on school retention. The benefit–cost ratio is estimated to be 1.75, higher than the ex‐ante estimate of the project. The value of the pilot remains unchanged when we include calculations from incomplete and/or unreliable data on sexual violence, injuries, thefts, and school dropout.Policy ImplicationsTwo conclusions can be drawn from this article. First, thatCiudades Segurasachieved great success in reducing murder rates, showing how working with communities to make cities safer and changing attitudes and expectations can work, when heavier policing does not. Second, that it is possible to assess the economic benefits derived from such programmes, even when adequate measures for subsequent evaluation were not included in the design of the pilot. [Correction added on 20 May 2021, after initial online publication: Abstract section has been updated in this version.]

This paper quantifies the magnitude of transitions across occupational categories in Colombia, a country with high unemployment and informality but quickly increasing its social security coverage in healthcare. The analysis makes use of a panel of households between 2008 and 2009 and representative of the main metropolitan areas in the country. Results confirm that transitions are large and asymmetric (twice as likely to happen from formal to informal occupations as vice versa ). These results, however, conceal an additional asymmetry typically overlooked: salaried formal workers are more likely to transition first into salaried informal occupations than self-employment and unemployment; instead, informal self-employed are more likely to transition into unemployment or out of the labor force than formal occupations. Furthermore, better education (better chances) and lower earnings (more need) increase the probability of labor transitions. Those already affiliated to health insurance are less likely to transition but affiliation to old-age pension insurance does not affect transitioning decisions. Females transition more than males. In the presence of these high-volume asymmetric transitions (and other factors such as workers' preferences and risk perceptions) the expansion of non-contributive social security schemes may seriously de-incentivize formality.

The allegedly complex relationship between trust and victimization has rarely been modeled and, when done, the effect of trust on victimization has been found not statistically significant. This study finds otherwise, estimating an instrumental model with community data from Cali, Colombia. Cali's dismal levels of victimization were only second to Medellin, the most violent city of the world in the 1990s. But Cali also pioneered a strategy of social capital formation as the backbone of a deliberate public policy to crack down on high levels of crime. This article first develops a model of victimization that includes interpersonal trust as determinant and then instruments interpersonal trust with district-level average trust. We argue that an individual-specific level of trust in his or her community members does not affect the community level of interpersonal trust in the margin. However, the levels – or perceived levels – of interpersonal trust in the community may affect the specific level of trust of an individual in other members of that community, along with personal characteristics and experience. Using GMM estimates, this study finds evidence of a relationship between interpersonal trust and victimization, statistically significant and negative in sign. The result is robust across specifications of trust, victimization, and estimating techniques. We conclude that increasing trust in trusting communities contributes to reducing victimization in its own right, although the effect is modest. Consequently, strengthening interpersonal trust is another bullet to combat victimization but it is not a silver bullet.

AbstractMotivationNational Human Rights Action Plans (NHRAPs) turn state commitments to human rights into policy. Despite their widespread implementation internationally, they remain little studied and there is limited consensus as to their effectiveness.PurposeThis article addresses this by using a political economy model to develop a framework to evaluate the success of NHRAPs. Within this framework it is argued that capacity, political structure, and political consensus are key drivers in the design and implementation of NHRAPs. We hypothesize that a country is likely to design and effectively use an NHRAP in policy‐making if at least these three requirements are met: (1) they are built on political consensus; (2) their perceived political benefits exceed their costs; and (3) governments have adequate resources to design and implement them.Approach and methodsWe evaluate this hypothesis using Chile as a case study. In 2016, Chile enacted a national law mandating NHRAPs. Since then, the country has adopted two NHRAPs: one spanning 2018–2021 and another covering 2022–2025.FindingsNone of the three stipulated requirements were met in Chile. There was deep polarization rather than consensus building; the political costs of implementing an NHRAP exceeded the benefits; and key government bodies in Chile lacked the personnel and mandate to implement NHRAPs.Policy implicationsThis study advances our understanding of the nuances of designing public policies for human rights, and the complex political costs associated with them. Unless political actors are committed to investing political capital and resources, it is unlikely that these plans will succeed. Our political economy framework can be replicated across multiple national action plans, countries, and contexts. Future studies can identify contributing conditions that can mitigate political costs, increasing the likelihood of the success of these plans.

Tunisia was showcased for a long time as an example of poverty reduction achievement and pro-poor growth. Yet, after halving its poverty rates a revolution took the world by surprise early in 2011 and since then nothing is known about its poverty levels. To fill that gap, this analysis develops and compares multiple cross-survey micro imputations (using household budgetary and labor force surveys) with macro poverty projections (based on sector GDP, unemployment and inflation). Results from both techniques are robust: poverty in post revolution Tunisia first increased in 2011 to then decrease in 2012. The magnitude of this swing oscillates between 1 and 2.3 percent points and accrues mostly from urban areas. Methods using readily available macro administrative data provide estimates of poverty levels and trends very close to those provided by analytically more sophisticated and data demanding micro imputation techniques. These findings for Tunisia provide relevant insights in data deprived contexts with serious deficiencies in the frequency and accessibility of welfare statistics.

AbstractSocial sustainability is poorly understood and vaguely defined, despite growing appreciation for its relevance as a concept. This article advances our empirical understanding of social sustainability by constructing a global database of 71 indicators across 193 countries and 37 territories between 2016 and 2020. Indicators are flexibly clustered around four dimensions—social inclusion, resilience, social cohesion and process legitimacy—for which we construct measurement indices. A simple empirical analysis—based on correlations and scatterplots—using our database confirms that social sustainability is positively and strongly associated with per capita income; negatively and strongly associated with poverty; and negatively but weakly associated with income inequality. The interactions between dimensions merit further analysis, but our results underscore that social sustainability matters not only in itself but also to reduce poverty. Furthermore, extending access to markets, basic public services and social assistance needs to be complemented with strengthening process legitimacy and social cohesion if inequality is to be reduced.

The article 'Fiscal Policy, Multidimensional Poverty, and Equity in Uganda: A Child-Lens Analysis', written by Jose Cuesta, Jon Jellema and Lucia Ferrone was originally published electronically on the publisher's internet portal on 18 of May 2021 without open access. With the author(s)' decision to opt for Open Choice the copyright of the article changed on 14 of September 2021 to © The Author(s), 2021 and the article is forthwith distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0.