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much to target one program or another on the table. It is therefore important to continue to learn from experience about how social protection can be improved. Although many programs try to differentiate eligibility and benefits, doing so is difficult. It cannot be done without errors and costs. Therefore, the next chapter delves into the empirics to understand the magnitudes of the outcomes and costs of the targeted social assistance programs observed in recent social protection programming in emerging and developing countries. The subsequent chapters take up the processes and methods used to differentiate eligibility and benefits, to learn how they can be done well.
Notes 1. As box O.1 in the overview chapter explains, “welfare” can be defined in various ways. Chapters 2 and 3 take up that discussion in more detail. This chapter uses the term without full specificity because the basic concern of focusing resources on those most in need pertains irrespective of the definition. The chapter uses a measure of money metric welfare as the default interpretation, and eligibility thresholds that can fall anywhere in the range from focusing on the very poor to screening out only the wealthy, but mostly fall below the median level of income. 2. ILO (2012); https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100: 0::NO::P12100_ILO_CODE:R202. 3. The formulae also commonly contain elements of redistribution, such as minimum benefits. 4. https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/social-security/WCMS_378991/lang--en /index.htm. 5. The term “patchwork” is sometimes thought of as derogatory, but it is useful to understand wherein the insult lies. Literally, patchwork is a specific design for quilting patterns (among other popular traditional designs, such as the northern star or wedding ring). Quilting originated as a practical way to produce warmth from pieces of fabric that were each too small to make a good blanket on its own. In that sense, quilting was a way to handle a budget constraint. When executed well, it produced both warmth and beauty from limited resources. The patchwork design is the simplest to execute as the shapes are simple squares, which are sometimes large and usually uniformly sized. Thus, patchwork is often the first pattern a novice quilter learns. The derogatory use of the term refers not to the idea that the object is a quilt, nor to its potential warmth or beauty, but to the skill of the seamstress. 6. https://www.msn.com/en-ph/money/personalfinance/social-amelioration -program-how-to-qualify-and-how-much-can-you-receive/ar-BB12EtA5; https://www.dof.gov.ph/dof-says-covid-19-emergency-subsidy-largest -social-protection-program-in-phl-history/. 7. The notion of “the poverty line” in this formulation can be interpreted more flexibly as an eligibility threshold or suite of thresholds for different programs
