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Developing a Safety Net for Ukraine
This dissertation explores issues of development of social safety nets (SSN) in countries in transition, Ukraine in particular, and looks at whether reducing social security expenditures to stimulate economic growth policy is an effective way to combat poverty in such countries. The dissertation develops a sequence of increasingly sophisticated forecasting models to explore the fiscal and economic implications of recent increases in social welfare spending in Ukraine: a simple macroeconomic model; a macroeconomic model with GDP feedback; and a microsimulation model. The analysis based on the models suggests that the simple macroeconomic model may significantly underestimate costs of SSN. Policy analysis based on the microsimulation model suggests that a policy of increasing social benefits in the current social safety net system would be the least optimal policy within the scope of evaluated policies to reduce number of people in poverty while sustaining economic growth. The dissertation concludes that available SSN financial resources would be more effective in reducing poverty if current SSN programs were replaced by a minimal subsistence level income guarantee program.
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Contents
Chapter One:
Introduction
Chapter Two:
Social safety net as a policy problem
Chapter Three:
Specifics of the social safety nets in transition
Chapter Four:
Analyzing the social safety net in Ukraine
Chapter Five:
Naive static model
Chapter Six:
Economic feedback of the increase in social security benefits
Chapter Seven:
Better targeting of social benefits
Chapter Eight:
Microsimulation model of the social safety net
Chapter Nine:
Evaluating social safety net policy reform options for Ukraine
Chapter Ten:
Conclusion
This document was submitted as a dissertation in April 2007 in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the doctoral degree in public policy analysis at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. The faculty committee that supervised and approved the dissertation consisted of Jacob Klerman (Chair), Susan Gates, and Marek Dabrowski.
This product is part of the Pardee RAND Graduate School (PRGS) dissertation series. PRGS dissertations are produced by graduate fellows of the Pardee RAND Graduate School, the world's leading producer of Ph.D.'s in policy analysis. The dissertation has been supervised, reviewed, and approved by a PRGS faculty committee overseeing the dissertation.
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