Overview of Key Arrangements: Institutional Actors, Regulations, and Program Financing

Abstract

Outlines the institutional and financing arrangements of the last-resort income support (LRIS) programs in seven country cases and distills lessons from the programs’ various approaches to administrative and financial decentralization. The implementation arrangements of LRIS programs in Eastern Europe and Central Asia were shaped, to different degrees, by two factors: (1) the legacy of the social protection systems of the former socialist regimes and (2) the decentralization reforms affecting all transition countries during the 1990s. Most countries in the Eastern Europe and Central Asia region have several tiers of administration involved in the management and implementation of LRIS programs, and in general, the institutional map of the programs is complex. An important issue in almost all countries reviewed in this study is the lack of clear procedures for program administration. Lessons include a prominent warning against decentralized funding, which runs the risk of creating inequities and may lead to serious resource constraints.