assistance. As all adults were expected to work and provided with the same means, social protection was designed around the needs of the workforce or confined to a set of 'pensions' granted to citizens who were not able to work such as the disabled. The transitional recession and the growth in unemployment and poverty changed this scenario drastically and governments found themselves unequipped to deal with these new challenges. With the support of international institutions, FSU countries embarked on a program of social protection reforms. The distinction between social insurance and social assistance became more important as the pension funds were made extra-budgetary and the informal sectors were expanding quickly leaving large sections of the populations unprotected. It became also necessary to shift from a categorical type of cash benefits to a means-tested system in order to focus attention on the real poor.

In many FSU republics, social protection reforms are still largely incomplete and the evaluation of such reforms is in an early stage. In particular, reforms have largely focused on social insurance relegating social assistance to a backstage role which explains the scarce attention of researchers to such instruments. This is also explained by the fact that the household budget surveys which are necessary to evaluate public transfers are still few and discontinuous.

There are, however, some studies that evaluated public transfers in transitional economies combining social insurance and social assistance transfers. Milanovic (2000) looked at social protection transfers in Latvia using one cross-section survey. He finds a weak pro-poor role of social protection benefits but does not distinguish between social insurance and social assistance benefits and provides an incidence rather than an impact evaluation. Lokshin and Ravallion (2000) analyzed the role of the social safety net in protecting the poor from the 1998 Russian financial crisis. They use two spells of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) and a rather broad definition of government transfers that includes social assistance and social insurance. They conclude that the social safety net in place was largely insufficient to protect the poor from the Russian crisis.

Welfare impact evaluations of social assistance benefits in other countries in transition outside the FSU are also scarce. Ravallion et al. (1995) looked at the early years of the transition in Hungary and focused on the role of the social safety net in protecting people from poverty and promoting their escape from poverty. Combining social insurance and social assistance benefits, they found that the safety net was able to protect effectively from poverty but did not play an important role in lifting people out of poverty. Van de Walle (2003) followed in the steps of this last paper to test the public safety net in Vietnam and found a very marginal role of the social safety net in protecting people from poverty or promoting an exit from poverty. Okrasa (1999a and 1999b) has used a four years panel survey from Poland to assess the impact on poverty of the public safety net using a survival analysis. The transfers considered are family allowances and unemployment benefits and the author finds a general positive impact on redistribution, a positive but moderate impact on reducing the poverty spell and a positive impact on exiting poverty with all 3