Independent Research and Policy Advocacy

What is Social Protection?

Blog post series: This series of posts will attempt to do two things – first, to examine the definitional boundaries of social protection and where they relate to other financial services for low-income households, and second, to use this to arrive at a working definition of social protection for policymakers and research organisations such as Dvara Research. As a first step, we break down a few questions in this first post.

A Primer on Competition in the Digital Economy

Disruptive innovations (mainly through digitalisation) are resulting in a change in the structure of
markets and their functioning, emergence of new business models as well as new products and
processes (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2017).

A Brief Comparison of the Bad Bank Experience across Jurisdictions

Bad Banks are typically Government sponsored Asset Reconstruction Companies (ARCs) setup with the primary objective of cleaning up bank balance sheets. Unlike private ARCs, the Bad Banks are setup as a one-time measure with the primary objective of reducing the build-up of Non-Performing Assets (NPAs) post a financial or economic crisis.

Managed Competition – Revisiting Enthoven’s Principles

In this piece, we revisit Enthoven’s principles and propose a broader definition of the concept of managed competition in order that it may encompass other countries’ experiences that do not conform to a strict application of Enthoven’s concept.

Demand for Health Insurance

Based on a study of the theoretical and empirical literature, we conclude with a set of hypotheses that looks at how demand for health insurance can be fostered by targeting both the components of demand (intention and action), through well-designed awareness measures and nudges to overcome the various behavioural biases involved.